On a first perusal, the positioning of said athletes does look a trifle unwieldy and raises the kind of eyebrow that was a treasured staple of Roger Moore’s intrigued countenance.
But I suppose it can’t be any more crushingly awkward than enduring foursomes golf with a woefully incompatible playing partner. Give me the double luge any auld day.
There is, of course, no escaping those Olympic rings just now. Thanks to money-soaked official partners dishing out vast sums to secure the right to integrate those five, interlocking thingamajigs into their advertising campaigns and products, even the most hum-drum household items are injected with a new sense of thrusting dynamism.
Procter & Gamble, for instance, “has used its voice as an Olympic sponsor to celebrate the journey athletes take on the road to their Olympic dreams and to honour and serve those who supported them along the way.”
Presumably, nothing encapsulates the struggle, the sacrifice, the elation and the dejection of supreme athletic endeavour quite like a 500ml bottle of squirty liquid that removes stubborn limescale from your showerhead?
Away from affairs in Milano Cortina, Anthony Kim’s impressive, improbable victory on the LIV Golf series in front of record-breaking crowds in Adelaide generated the kind of bubbly outpouring you’d get with one of Procter & Gamble’s foam detergents.
Yes, I know some of you will probably lose interest here at the mere mention of LIV. A few of you possibly switch off at the sight of the words ‘Nick Rodger’ on this page.
But whatever you think of LIV – or, indeed me – you can’t beat a rousing story of redemption and Kim’s recovery from addiction, mental troubles and injuries is testament to the human spirit.
“Don’t f***ing quit,” said Kim in an emotional post-victory press conference. I’m sure the sports editor bellowed something like that to me when he read one of my columns. Minus the word ‘don’t’, of course.
LIV may have divided men’s professional golf, but the praise for Kim’s efforts has been universal, even if some of it has been predictably hysterical. Was it as significant, for instance, as Tiger Woods’ Masters conquest of 2019? You can judge that eye-popping claim for yourselves.
Overhauling big guns, Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau on a thrilling final day, Kim claimed his first victory since returning to competitive golf a couple of seasons ago after 12 years in the wilderness.
Just in case you’d forgotten – or perhaps didn’t know in the first place – Kim was, at one stage, American golf’s next big thing. When his burgeoning reputation was bolstered by a second-place finish in his first start on the PGA Tour in 2006, superstar status was thrust upon him.
A couple of years later, Kim had barged his way into the world’s top-10 and had become the first US player under the age of 25 to win twice in one year on the tour since Woods in 2000. He was the heir to the throne and all that.
Fearless on the course, Kim enjoyed wild parties off it. AK, as he swiftly became known, was a showman and a show off. He was bold, brash and had a strut that could’ve been accompanied by the Stayin’ Alive tune from Saturday Night Fever.
By 2012, though, a succession of issues and ailments led to a series of withdrawals and a retreat from the limelight at the age of just 26.
Kim’s disappearance into the wilds inevitably led to him being dubbed golf’s Yeti. There were the odd glimpses here, occasional sightings there and speculation, conjecture and theories about him everywhere.
You half expected this elusiveness to lead to some slightly blurred, inconclusive picture of Kim on the front of a National Geographic magazine.
As the years passed, a sense of nostalgia and mystique grew around him, and his career generated the kind of giddy mythologizing that used to be the reserve of Zeus.
I, personally, never quite understood all the fuss over a three-time tour winner. But each to their own, eh?
His re-emergence on LIV was a canny marketing ploy/desperate publicity stunt by the Saudi-backed breakaway circuit. Greg Norman, who was at the vanguard of the rebel assault in his role as LIV supremo, certainly made the most of the cult of Kim and lured him out of his exile with a sizeable cheque.
LIV, said Norman, would provide “the opportunity for this star to be reborn.” The revival would take a while. In his first event back, Kim finished last, 33 shots behind the winner.
Over the next couple of trying seasons, Kim’s best finish was a tie for 25th. He was relegated from the circuit but showed his drive and resilience to earn his place back in the Promotions shoot-out.
From a busted flush, the 40-year-old has become one of the circuit’s trump cards.
Whether you love LIV or loathe LIV, you have to take your hat off to Kim for living the golfing dream again.