Someone won something in yachting today and guess what? Apart from that guy on the news who is always whacking off about boats I don't think anybody gave a shit because yachting is dead boring.
We in NZ seem to be infatuated with yachting because we’re surrounded by water. Following that logic we should be infatuated by hot air ballooning too because we’re surrounded by air, but thankfully we’re not. Because that would be far too much excitement for one country.
Yachting, if you’re into it, is an expensive pastime. That means only a small percentage of the population actually take part and most of them live in a place where a harbour is easily accessible i.e. Auckland or Wellington, so for a code that has quite possibly the smallest number of participants per capita we really do over excite ourselves.
The thing with yachting is that it’s shit to watch, live or on telly. It’s quite possibly worst on telly because you can’t ever tell who’s in the lead and how far they have to go. Something that seemed to escape everybody until only recently, when some smart buggers down south decided to come up with a graphic simulator to illustrate the whole boring thing.
Watching it live, from a million miles away on shore, you can sometimes tell who is leading whom, right up to the point one yacht tacks back and confuses the fuck out of everybody. Ah well, they’re so far away I can’t really tell who is who anyway...
Sporting wise we have been relatively successful at yachting and that has only added to the moistening of the gusset, so to speak. We seem to have won more than our fair share of medals and alike, quite possibly because no one else gives a toss, it is a boring sport after all.
Our biggest claim to fame was the time when we won the Americas Cup off America, the only other nation that seems as obsessed with yachting as us. The late, great Sir Peter Blake won it for us in his red socks, a fashion faux paus of epic proportions but we kooky Kiwis loved it and started wearing them too.
I wore one, but not on my foot.
Then sit started getting silly. Team New Zealand, like the Warriors and every other wannabe national side made up of foreigners before them, tried to milk the adulation for all it’s worth. The rich man’s sport tried to appeal to the common man by pretending to be a contest held on an equal playing field, which it isn’t.
I forget who won what around that time because a) it was boring and b) it wasn’t ‘us’, but I’m pretty sure it was a land locked country which has to be the lowest of blows doesn’t it? If being beaten by a bunch of watch and knife makers wasn’t embarrassing enough.
Admittedly things did get a bit interesting around then but only because with all the switching of loyalties and name calling it looked as though there might be the odd fist fight or three.
Which brings us to this morning’s race, which, from what little I heard before collapsing into a catatonic state of boredom, was won by a very close five minutes.
Fuck, that’s not boring at all, is it?
No comments:
Post a Comment