Poster boys have failed, our hammer queen scored zero...and the lawn bowler lost to the Reggae Roller. England’s biggest ever team have turned their pursuit of Common wealth gold into a £5m flop
ANDREW POZZI crashed into the first hurdle and with it another marquee name in this England team was done. An awful lot of barriers to gold on the Gold Coast, it would seem.
The numbers on the medal table might blur the picture but a look at the brushstrokes reveals just how disappointing the most hyped English athletes have been in Australia.
Pozzi was never quite positioned in the front and centre of that gang. But he was one of the bigger boys, a reigning world indoor champion who last night found himself looking at a podium collective featuring Nicholas Hough — the 43rd fastest hurdler of 2017.
‘It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see I should have been fighting for the medals,’ he said as he made his way out of the Carrara Stadium, trying to compute how he finished in a tie for sixth.
‘The standard is very good but I was in good enough shape to win a medal. These opportunities don’t come up often so I may have to wait years for another. I just wasn’t good enough.’
An hour after Pozzi trudged off, Sophie Hitchon, the Olympic hammer bronze medallist, walked on knowing her season’s best gave her a metre on the rest of the field. One no-throw became two and two became three and out.
‘No one in 2014 thought I was going to win a medal in Rio, so two years out from Tokyo, I’ll be ready for it,’ she said. Eyebrows went higher than her hammer.
It was just that kind of day for Team England — a day of farce and bewilderment in a week when so many top athletes in this £5million expedition got it wrong.
It was around 9am local time when the low-water mark was reached. That’s when an email dropped saying that the English cyclist Melissa Lowther would not contest yesterday’s individual time trial.
The reason? Because she had accidentally not been entered in the race by a series of Team England administrators, who failed to tick a box on a spreadsheet, and then missed the mistake in six stages of a checking procedure.
Lowther was briefed that she had a problem on Monday but was told an appeal had been lodged. She woke up on race day yesterday to the news that it had been rejected. Her response was of measured devastation; it is understood that British Cycling opted more for private fury, baffled by one of the more ludicrous episodes in the recent history of English sport.
No heads will roll over this saga and that is fortunate, because on the basis of this week it is tempting to wonder if the executioner would drop the axe on his own foot.
Cruel, perhaps, but so much has gone awry for the team in their most high-profile scenarios. Granted, 24 golds have been won, putting England’s expensively assembled team of nearly 400 athletes second only to Australia. In that cluster, athletes such as Nile Wilson, Nick Miller, James Willstrop and Aimee Willmott have broken through to new levels, and Zoe Smith won a wonderful weightlifting silver after funding her campaign by working in a coffee shop.
But when the spotlight has been brightest, the performances have been at their dullest, starting with Alistair Brownlee ranking 10th in the triathlon on day one, the legacy of an injuryhindered preparation.
From one double Olympic champion downed in flames to another in Max Whitlock. He played a part in a team gold but the abiding memory is of him botching the two events he won at the Olympics — the floor and pommel horse. Silver on the pommel hurt most because he was unbeaten on that apparatus since 2015, but his sixth place on the floor was staggering.
He finished behind a champion, Marios Georgiou of Cyprus, whose only previous medals came in an event called the Games of the Small States of Europe. He doubles up as a part-time dancer named Street Boy Killer.
And what of Britain’s own killer, Adam Peaty? He was the ruthless winner of every race he contested in the past four years, including Saturday’s 100m breaststroke. And then, just as the praise reached its peak, he was beaten in the 50m, a distance in which he holds the world record and just about every meaningful title.
Of course, sport offers no guarantees. But what a chastening experience this has been for the leading lights in the modest fields of the Commonwealth.
Look at Nick Matthew and Laura Massaro, top seeds in the men’s and women’s squash events — dumped out of their quarter-finals. Even England’s world No 3 Robert Paxton was yesterday beaten in the lawn bowls by Andrew Newell, a Jamaican called the Reggae Roller who had lost all his previous matches.
Injuries have played a part, namely for Adam Gemili, the 2014 silver medallist who did not start the 100m final because of an adductor tear in the semi-finals.
But what of Tom Daley, who yesterday pulled out of his defence of the 10m platform citing a hip problem? The jarring part is that he is evidently fit enough to dive in the synchro event, saying it puts less stress on his injury.
Less stressful still would be to climb the steps to that board and not come down until it’s time to fly home. On the basis of the other belly flops suffered by household names in the team, it might just be the smartest play.