Despite me being British, sport has always bored me to tears. So imagine my surprise when I found myself bawling my eyes out with pride in our sportspeople twice in one day! Perhaps their Bond-like approach to overcoming adversity had something to do with it?

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Skyfall screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan

I’m supposed to love sport, being British and all.

We are, after all, a nation very adept at conflating sporting success with success of other kinds. If you want to succeed in the boardroom, you need to make sure you don’t take your eye off the ball. Success in the bedroom means scoring. Those who score frequently may be termed players. Above all, sport is war. 'Play up! play up! and play the game!' wrote Sir Henry Newbolt in 1892, inspiring generations of public school-educated boys to fight the enemy with the fortitude of the last man in at a cricket match.

Newbolt’s poem certainly struck a chord with the public although he himself grew to hate it, describing it as a Frankenstein’s Monster - an apt description I’d say. Technically brilliant Newbolt’s poem might be, but it propagates the macho imperialist mentality which I have never been able to identify with. The mentality which is responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the misery of countless more, right up until the present day.

Newbolt himself was born in Bilston, near Wolverhampton, mere minutes from where I live and a bus ride away from most of the venues of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, hosted by Birmingham. The so-called ‘friendly games’ are one of the more palatable legacies of the British Empire. Harder to swallow is the fact that the majority of countries competing still have homophobic laws on their books because Britain put them there in the 19th Century. But full credit to the producers of the 2022 games: they didn’t attempted to cover up the parts of Birmingham’s and Britain’s histories we find uncomfortable. The opening ceremony put some of them on full display, raising awareness of various causes, including LGBTQ+ rights.

Who knows what someone of Newbolt’s generation would have made of the 2022 games?

Newbolt himself does not appear to have been a bad sort and he was alive for the first three Games, up until 1938, when the games were paused, not resuming until 1950, due to the Second World War.

Sport and war continued their sinister association throughout the remainder of the 20th Century and into the 21st, although this has often gone unremarked upon and accepted without challenge. In his foreword to the book ‘Race’, Sport and British Society, Paul Gilroy called out his fellow sociologists for not investing more of their energies in unpacking phrases like ‘two world wars and one world cup, doo dah, doo dah’, still heard on football terraces today. Well, when the men are playing anyway.

Following the victory of the England Women’s Team at the Euro 2022 competition, sports researcher Steven Lawther wrote that he finally had an England team he could support. Lawther’s Scottishness wasn’t the impediment to him showing support for the England men’s team: it was the boorish “‘One World Cup, Two World Wars’ mentality that pollutes support for the male side.” That’s the reason I feel self-conscious wearing an England shirt: will people think I am endorsing this mindset?

I used to dread people asking me what football team I supported. When I told them ‘I don’t’, I got an expression in response which read along the lines of ‘Does not compute’. I felt bad, because this was probably someone innocently trying to strike up a conversation about something they assumed everyone was in to. Fortunately, I had James Bond to fall back on. Nearly everyone has an opinion about that.

If you’re a Brit, whether you ‘follow’ Bond or football is immaterial. If you live here, you will be immersed in the culture and both Bond and football are ubiquitous. Perhaps because of this ubiquity of football, at an early age I fell into the trap of thinking all sport was like football: macho, boorish and - worst of all - boring. I tried watching football matches, even going to see them in person at Molineux, the home of Wolverhampton Wanderers. But I quickly found my attention wandering because I was not invested in the characters (I.E. the players). It was like walking into a film half way through. Who are these people? Why should I care about what they are doing? Does it really matter if they win or lose?

In a classic case of confirmation bias, every sport I encountered after football seemed to affirm what I had always thought was true: I have nothing in common with the people playing this or the people watching it.

Being queer didn’t help matters. There were very few out sportspeople when I was growing up. And the culture around sport was seemingly very heteronormative, although when it comes to football, staring intently at 22 men in short shorts for 90 minutes does rather call this into question.

If there had been more out queer participants, perhaps I would have been able to find my way into the narrative. As it was, I never felt invested in what was going on. Instead, I turned to books, video games and films.

Paradoxically, whereas sport in the real world rarely held my attention, I have always lapped up sports movies. Although I have never watched any American football, I was glued to Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday. Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer combined football AND martial arts to spectacularly hilarious and moving effect. Raging Bull is THE self-destructive character study. Senna left me an emotional wreck for weeks, as did Million Dollar Baby. I went to see Darren Aranofsky’s The Wrestler multiple times in the cinema. Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India, is not only a great sports movie but also a stunning musical AND an epic indictment of Empire. The Rocky series is one of my favourites (I have all the Blu Rays).

Whether they are challenging viewing or more conventional, I love all kinds of sports movies: I don’t discriminate. Very few feature queer characters. A notable exception is the documentary Next Goal Wins, which I wouldn’t stop telling people about for months after seeing it in 2014. And I’m looking forward to the story becoming more widely known after the re-telling, directed by Taiki Waititi, is released in 2023.

Next Goal Wins is the story of the ‘worst football team in the world’, American Samoa, recovering from a losing streak. Their ‘star player’ is what we would call non-binary. In Samoan, they are fa’afafine, a third gender which has always been a part of Samoan culture. Even without this queer dimension to the film, I would have been obsessed with Next Goal Wins because, like all the best sports movies, it’s about fortitude: the strength of mind to bear up in the face of adversity.

Fortitude is the reason many of us sobbed with joy when the England women’s team succeeded against Germany at Wembley. Steven Lawther summarised the adversity they had overcome thusly:

“Banned from playing, ridiculed, told they weren’t good enough, and having to battle for every scrap of resource and support.”

Before watching the match, I only knew a few of the players’ names (the same would have been true for me if I had been watching England’s men’s team). But knowing a little about the way the women’s team had been treated immediately gave me a way into their narrative.

In my kitchen, I found myself yelling at the TV when Germany scored an equalising goal in the 79th minute. As the tension ramped up and up, I started using ‘we’ to describe ‘our’ team’s performance, in a way I always find irritating when people speak of the men’s team as if they are part of the team. And when the goal came in extra time, from ‘our’ girl Chloe Kelly, I was surprised to find myself jumping up and down in front of the tele.

Perhaps it helped that earlier in the same day, I had been to see the men’s artistic gymnastics at the Commonwealth Games and been similarly affected, priming me for an outpouring of emotion.

I’ll confess that my interest in going to see any of the Games beyond the opening and closing ceremonies was pretty low. It was piqued slightly when I saw which tickets my husband had booked for us: they were mostly the events where men would be competing while wearing not many clothes. Nice one darling! But I didn’t expect to be captivated by the sporting side of things.

I barely knew anything about gymnastics and, having now watched some, I would hardly claim to be an expert. But that didn’t really matter, because I was immediately drawn in by the gymnasts (and not merely for the obvious clothing-related reasons). The live commentary filled in some of their backstories, including some of the adversities these men had overcome. But I resisted the urge to do a full Wikipedia run down on each of them for fear of missing the action.

When I saw James Hall land deeply on a dismount I knew something was wrong. He did a decent job of covering it up at first, but there was definitely something amiss with his leg. And even I know, when it comes to gymnastics, having fully working legs is pretty fundamental. As the Cumberland News put it: “If you were making a list of the worst sports to play while on one leg, gymnastics would rank close to the top.”

As James’s team rallied around him, so did the crowd. ‘We’ felt part of the same team, which I’m sure is something regular sports fans take for granted, but it was a hitherto alien feeling for me. The only time I have felt this way, is when I have been so thoroughly invested in my favourite fictional characters that I have felt as though I could feel their pain.

Narratively-speaking, creating a sense of imbalance is crucial for drawing in the audience. And another thing even I know about gymnastics: balance is very important!

In Tzvetan Todorov’s famous formulation, you begin with equilibrium. This stable situation is then disturbed by something which forces the characters to search for a new equilibrium. Every Bond story fits this formulation and Fleming excels at putting his characters off-balance, ramping up the tension by giving them a world of pain to contend with, both physically and psychologically.

Watching James Hall finding the fortitude to keep going, I thought of those times where Bond has to draw deeply on his mental reserves, my favourite example being the end of Fleming’s Moonraker. With Drax’s missile poised to destroy London, Bond really puts himself - and his accomplice, Gala Brand - through it. Fleming puts us readers through it all with them.

Bond has already had his head beaten as if it “had been used as a football." And now he has to use a blow torch to melt through the copper wire that has been used to bind their wrists. Not having the use of his hands, he has to use his teeth, which means his face getting uncomfortably close the blow torch. It’s one of the most exquisitely painful passages in Fleming:

“It was a horrible manoeuvre and though he whipped back his head with the speed of a snake he let out a gasp of pain as the jet of blue fire from the torch seared across his bruised cheek and the bridge of his nose.

“But the vaporised paraffin was hissing out its vital tongue of flame and he shook the water out of his streaming eyes and bent his head almost at right angles and again got his teeth to the handle of the blowtorch.”

Bond believes the only way to detroy the rocket is for him to light a last cigarette underneath it and blow it up - along with himself. Fortunately, Gala suggests they change the flight plan instead, a less ‘macho’ solution certainly but, fortunately for the lifespan of Bond and the Bond series (Moonraker was only the third book), one Bond goes along with.

But it’s nowhere near over for James and Gala. Next they have to reach the rocket by climbing through a ventilator shaft which leaves them covered in cuts and bruises. And then, most horrifying of all, they are almost boiled alive by Drax’s men filling the shaft with scaldingly-hot steam.

“Whoosh. It was getting closer.

Whoosh! Two away.

WHOOSH!! Next door. A suspicion of the wet smell of steam came to him.

Hold tight, Bond said to himself. He smothered her in towards him and held his breath.

Now. Quick. Get it over, damn you.

And suddenly there was a great pressure and heat and a roaring in the ears and a moment of blazing pain.

Then dead silence, a mixture of sharp cold and fire on the ankles and hands, a feeling of soaking wet and a desperate, choking effort to get pure air into the lungs.

Their bodies automatically fought to withdraw from each other, to capture some inches of space and air for the areas of skin that were already blistering.”

Fleming uses a countdown and Bond’s internal monologue to build up our dread as he and we wait for adversity to arrive. Talk about fortitude!

Watching the gymnasts at the Games, I noticed how they would release their held breath in the seconds before approaching the apparatus. Some had more reason to be holding their breath than others. When I saw James Hall approach the horizontal bar, his final challenge, I could see determination on his face I immediately thought of as ‘Bond-like’.

Reports of Hall’s triumph called him “heroic” for his stoicism in the face of adversity, for “sensationally overcoming” his ankle injury. Hall himself took pains (while being in considerable physical pain) to credit the support of his team and the crowd. Magnanimously, on the podium, Hall the silver medal winner kissed the gold medal earned by teammate Jake Jarman, who had supported him to the end.

We need more exemplars of British fortitude like this - James Hall, the England women’s team - which we can all get behind. Maybe they have been there, in sport, all along but I just didn’t see them. Or their narratives were not sufficiently resonant for me to connect with them.

Now I’ve seen some, I know what to look for. And in the meantime, I’m not going to let a small minority of nationalistic living-in-the-past wazzocks get in the way of me feeling proud to wear an England shirt to my next sporting event.

Disclaimer for readers from Wales and Scotland: the Bond series regular mingles together Britain and England so it’s not my fault I’ve had to do the same here. No offence intended!

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