Simon Barnes at the Olympic Games

A stagger to the finish line

My colleague, Jeremy Griffin, rang me to tell me that he had my ticket for the opening ceremony. "I don't want to disappoint you," I said. "But I think you'll find that's a ticket for the closing ceremony. If you're expecting another 16 days of sport, you're going to be disappointed."

So we giggled a bit, slightly hysterically, it must be said. We have all been working insanely hard over the past, well, I've been here a shade over three weeks. I'm not asking for pity, obviously, it's been bloody wonderful, but all the same, well, another 16 days at this pace might be tricky.

Good curry provides food for thought

I think it was Steven Spielberg who, when asked what advice he had for aspiring film directors, said: "Wear comfortable shoes." I have some advice for all journalists who cover the Olympic Games: get enough to eat, get enough to sleep. You can't cover a 17-day story on adrenalin.

It's been a hard couple of weeks, and most of Team Times are ever-so-slightly on their knees. Not that any one is complaining: it's the nature of the event and neither I nor anyone else would wish to be anywhere else. Nevertheless, it is a smart move to keep exhaustion at bay, and you can only do that with food and sleep.

Time to invoke the Conway principle

As the two British swimmers threshed their way around the marathon course yesterday, my old friend Matthew Engel, former editor of Wisden currently writing for, of all things, the Financial Times, announced: "It's time to invoke the Conway Principle." He meant that he was now cheering for a British one-two, not that one cheers out loud in the press-box, at least, not very often.

He was cheering for the British double because it would be a good story, for the Conway Principle, as elaborated by Doug Conway, star writer of the Australian Associated Press is "barrack the yarn." Barrack is an Australians for "cheer for".

In other words, you don't cheer for the individual or for the country, you cheer for the story. So if a British win is a great tale, you cheer for the Brits, if abject British failure is the story, then the last thing you want is some Brit doing something half-decent.

Just how on earth do they do it?

The single sport specialists sometimes refer to those of us who move from sport to sport as "nothing-writers".  It is assumed that we know nothing about any sport, and that we just make sweeping conclusions about personality based on little knowledge and less understanding. This attitude is mainly jocular, it must be said. And besides, most of us nothing-writers not only have but actively cultivate a good relationship with the specialists. We need them, after all.

After seeing the amazing Yelena, I need a bit of a lie down

What's a chap supposed to do when a gorgeous woman in mascara, nail-varnish and a sarong  shows him how unbelievably wonderful her body is? Particularly when she then removes the sarong to jump over over a house? My instinct is to say "how absolutely bloody wonderful" and then go for a bit of a lie-down.
Yelena Isinbayeva set a new world record for the pole-vault at the Bird's Nest Stadium last night, clearing 5.05 metres. And she flirted with me (admittedly with a billion or so others as well) and blew me kisses and won the competition by 25 centimetres. In fact, she had it won with only two jumps: after that, it was just The Me Show, when she went for what she had really come for, a new Olympic record, breaking her own, and then the new world record, also breaking her own.

Fabulous athlete, fabulous sport, unforgettable night. But I was not in a position to take a lie-down. I had to write. And here we come to the dilemma of all heterosexual male sportswriters when writing about a woman who is (a) brilliant and (b) gorgeous. Is it acceptable to say that she's gorgeous? Or can I only say that she is brilliant?

I always have room for another Paula Radcliffe piece

The Times sports editor, Tim Hallissey, and I have a number of jokes to ease the daily round: little running tag-lines and triggers and cues that you build up over any extended and cheerful working relationship. One of these began during the great Ashes series of 2005. "Have you got another Flintoff piece in you?" Tim would ask.

And always the answer would be yes. Because you do. Some people you write about again and again and again, and always there is something new to say. Have you got another David Beckham piece in you? Have you got another Jonny Wilkinson piece in you? Of course I have: I'm a sportswriter.

I don't get writers block at the great events in sport

I went to the men's 100 metres final on Saturday night and it might have been the greatest race ever run. But does that make it hard to write about?

As I ponder the question, I am at once taken back to the days when I was a bad news reporter on the Surrey Mirror. I was a bad reporter, so I never got any good stories to write. I always got bad stories.
And when they got into the paper, they always looked like bad stories and they always read like bad stories.

This is because bad stories are much harder to write than good stories.  I was a bad reporter, so all the stories I got were bad. And since I only ever wrote bad stories, I was obviously a bad reporter. There was no escape: from the logic, from the conclusion, from my destiny as a bad reporter.

That's why I went to join the sports desk. And because there were only three of us, I had to cover everything -- everything at all -- that happened in Redhill's (and Reigate's) sporting life. Good stories, bad stories, medium stories: it was my job to write them all. And it was then that I discovered the truth: any one can make a good story good; very few people can make a bad story good.

The supreme moments in sport are wonderful to experience. But they are also pretty wonderful to write about. You never find yourself struggling to get in the mood: words come bubbling along and you do your best to put them in the right order. The great events in sport do not get many people suffering from writer's block.

There is perhaps a hesitation. If you have seen the best piece of sport in years, you naturally want to have a crack at writing the best piece of journalism for, well, days anyway. But once you have got over that inhibition, words generally come a-tumbling.

The strange behaviour of my blog trolls

My friend George told me about trolls. George works in Beijing, and is an expert on communications. As you would expect, then, he knows rather more than me about the internet. He swims at his ease in its heaving waters while I splash about with a rubber ring. And he had been picking up some of the stuff I have been writing here, and told me some of the comments that had been affixed. "My God, the trolls were out," he said.

China: lovely people, shame about their rulers

One of the first rules for anyone working away from home - and I suspect that this rule counts double if you are trying to write something about the country you find yourself in - is to establish an affectionate relationship with the place. It's a rule that athletes work on. Many make a conscious effort to strike up a friendship with the place, with the stadium in which they are competing.

In short, they will try and establish home advantage when they are away: try and get the walls and the roof and the floor on their side. No one wants to feel awkward, ill at ease, out of place.

And I always try and do the same thing when I am travelling for The Times. I want to like the place. I work at this reasonably hard: not just by having nice fuzzy thoughts, by also by reading, by absorbing as much of the culture as I can by means of the medium that means most to me.

Talking pictures

Today Michael Phelps became the first man in history to win ten Olympic gold medals. About an hour later, he became the first to win eleven. And as I walked between pool and press conference, I bumped into Marc Aspland, Times photographer, walking hard in the opposite direction, buried under his usual load of gear. "Making pictures?" I asked. He wagged his head: in admiration of the man, in love of his subject.

The subject has caught his imagination as it has caught mine. And it is a little known fact of journalism, at least among writers, that the most important thing if you want your story to be read, is a good picture. It's great that Marc is as hot for this one as me.