Summer of sport

So that’s it over then, the summer of sport.  I’d been so looking forward to it ever since the turn of the year, so much to get excited about and so much to watch.  There were the usual big annual events such as Wimbledon and the Tour de France but also some massive tournaments including the Euros and of course, the Olympics.

For me it all started just after the close of the football season, in itself exciting enough especially as a Toon supporter and there were the Euros to look forward to.  I don’t normally get excited by watching England play (England is somewhere down south) but when they got through the group stages and on top as well my temperature rose a few degrees.  As we know now it was not to be and the gloss was taken off the tournament once again by the farce that is the penalty shootout.

Perhaps Wimbledon would be better and it was.  Murray had a real chance to win; all he had to do was to beat all the other best players in the world.  He came so close, winning the first set in the final only to lose out.  He finally won over the crowd though and that was a breakthrough for him.

OK, so what next?  The Tour de France but we never win that do we?  This year though we had Wiggins up front who bossed it after the first week.  The final stage has to be one of the highlights of the summer, with two British riders on the podium and Cav winning the final stage on the Champs Élysées.

And then it was the big one, seventeen days of Olympic sporting competition.  I wasn’t sure that I was going to enjoy the games but I did.  At first it seemed that we weren’t going to do very well, it was as if the expression ‘it’s not the winning but the taking part’ had been written just for team GB but then the toothpaste was out of the tube and we couldn’t help ourselves.  Some days it felt disappointing when we only won three golds.  But what was the best part?  There were so many, the athletics, the cycling, the swimming, the boxing (Nicola Adams is great); it was all good and it was nice to see some sports that don’t normally get any coverage.  A couple of them I even had to look up the rules to make sense of what was going on.

For me, the fairy tale repeat of the Wimbledon tennis final has to do it.  You couldn’t have written a better script.  Would Murray do it this time?  Would Federer rise to the occasion as he always seems to do?  Being a Murray fan can be hard work and even when he was two sets up my heart was still in my mouth.  I’m thinking of this win as a slam, even though the ATP has other ideas, bring on the US Open.

So that’s it then, the summer of sport has been and gone.  What am I going to do with the void in my life?  Don’t worry the football season starts this weekend.