London Olympic 2012
Ashes at Lord’s
Even at the best of times, archery is a low-key, quiet affair that requires intense concentration. As such there is often little hubbub surrounding the sport and none of the passion that sets apart sports like football.
But yesterday at the Lord’s Cricket Ground, it was archery that kicked-off the non-football events on a day when the whole of London was more fixated on the opening ceremony. It was with a mild amount of surprise then that a small corner of the ground was found to be quiet noisy. And with good reason too. Lord’s, the home of cricket, had bought together two of its most famous sons.
Far to the left of the nursery stood two men who in the past had fought many battles against each other, many too in this very ground. A slightly more greying, but no less graceful Michael Atherton, once captain of England, stood chatting to another slightly greying gentleman dressed in a baggy green cap. That man was the former Australia captain Steve Waugh.
It was almost too surreal. Two former cricket captains, standing side-by-side in an archery event at the Olympic Games. It takes quite a bit of imagination to put that together.
Atherton, now a full-fledged journalist for London Times, summed it up best in the first thing that he said to Waugh, “What in the world are you doing here?”
The answer to which, of course, is that Steve Waugh is acting as one of three athlete liaison officers with the Australian team. And true to type, it is a role he has filled with some controversy.
Waugh had apparently clashed with another liaison officer, Kieren Perkins, the swimming legend, over the use of ‘sledging’ in archery or other sports. Waugh had apparently claimed that there was always room for such to destabilise opponents in any game.
But yesterday, Waugh swiftly brushed off those claims saying instead that his comments were off-the-cuff, said as a joke, and taken completely out of context.
-With The Daily Star input
