"Look at this … what a beautiful boy … Sorry …" The father of Chad Le Clos, talking to Clare Balding on the BBC, was overwhelmed. "Is this live?" he asked. "Yes," she said, cheerfully. It wasn't as if he'd said a swear word. The proud South African was just overwhelmed. Before he'd even considered the fact that Chad Le Clos had beaten Michael Phelps, the greatest Olympian of all time, in the 200m butterfly, he was baffled, brought to the very edge of comprehension, by his own son's beauty.
Which, to a greater or lesser degree, is how we all feel. For these weeks only, watching these near-deities for whom every muscle has a purpose and every tweak of a body hair is a bid for greatness, we are allowed to make remarks we would never normally make. We're allowed to gawp at perfection, marvel at beauty, openly wish we could prod chests and have a go on triceps – it's the Olympic Gaze, an objectification amnesty. You want to compare the swimming to a gay porn film? Be our guest. You want to rank the athletes in order of do-ability? You are welcome (the author of the Hotlympics Hunks of London site captions frankly: "Vavrinec Hradilek, Canoe Slalom, Czech Republic, 25. Until today I didn't even know canoeist was a word"). There's been a massive sense-of-humour boost and even feminists such as myself will not complain when you say Lizzie Armitstead looks like an incredibly strong flower fairy in a helmet. So long as it's not only the beach volleyball players – if we're going to stare at everyone as if they've just dropped down from heaven, then who can complain?
Olympic-watchers of yore admitted upfront that open-mouthed staring was one of the core purposes of the games. In ancient Greece, the athletes were asked to march naked through the streets before the games began – it was a warmup exercise for the spectators, before the main event of watching them all compete naked, which (I would think) takes an incredible amount of concentration. The story is that the naked-sport tradition began when a runner's loin cloth fell off, and he appeared to go faster than the others. Wearing clothes came eventually to signify Barbarianism, or at the very least, shame in a less-than-peak condition body. We are nearing that situation today (after all the swimmers, didn't the judo women look overdressed? It was almost an insult to their skill how many clothes they had to wear). The years 364 to 2008 may turn out to have been the anomaly, and soon all perfect people will be naked, throughout the games. Something to consider for Rio. Anyway, moving on.
Why isn't it offensive, the slavering? Because of the almost pitch-perfect balance of men and women. Usually, when people go on about attributes, they are female – Kylie's arse is springing unbidden into my mind, which just shows my age. Unlike her arse, of course, which never does. If the gazing falls entirely on either gender, I always get a whiff of something other than admiration, a desire to undermine or get a reaction or be modern. When it falls equally upon everybody, you have to think that maybe there is no ulterior motive. Maybe we're staring because they're amazing. That's it! How are you going to not stare? That would be like being too polite to stare at a comet.
When the perfection has a purpose, you get a sense of the bodies having a mind of their own. The normal business of objectification always downplays the fact that the body is attached to a person – it always amazes me how often the model in a flesh-fest is looking away or downwards. In porn, they take this to an almost comical level, cropping the head clean off, the better to enjoy whatever fantasies you want to attach to the rest of the body. It ends up debasing everyone: the object, the subject, the newsagent, passersby. Contrawise, you do not debase when you go on about an athlete's thighs; her body is indivisible from her life's work, it can clear 100 metres' worth of hurdles in 12.54 seconds; it is her pride and joy. To say she's perfect is like telling someone they have cute children. Plus, there is the simple mathematics that it's impossible to offend, by objectifying, gazing, fixating, or obsessing over in any other way, someone who is so superior. Some idiot on Twitter made a remark speculating about the sexuality of weightlifter Zoe Smith following a BBC documentary about her (the thought process goes: "I'm scared of admiring a woman's muscles in case people think I'm gay; so I'll call her gay! That'll fool them." It's so comically unintelligent, it's the kind of thing I can imagine a dog thinking). Anyway, she replied on her blog: "What makes you think that we actually give a toss, that you, personally, do not find us attractive? What do you want us to do? Shall we stop weightlifting, amend our diet in order to completely get rid of our 'manly' muslces and become housewives in the sheer hope that one day you will look more favourably upon us and we might actually have a shot with you?" You can't offend a superperson, not by insult, not by over-praise, any more than leaves can offend the wind.
If we can return to the subject of thighs – this picture of Andre Greipel and Robert Forstemann went viral last week. I saw it via Gransnet, that hotbed of lascivious surfing. The German cyclists were having a quad competition. Forstemann won hands down: he has legs like an Edwardian grand piano. The photograph was clearly taken in the daytime, which makes you wonder what they find in their trousers to compare once the sun is over the yardarm. These bodies are not simply perfect, they are differently perfect; the rest of the time, the rules of attractiveness are circumscribed, handed down by a prissy marketing automaton who doesn't like smells. In mainstream images of physical perfection, you would never see a woman with big shoulders; you would only see a man who had waxed his chest in a special interest publication; you would never see a woman with quads that meant anything; you would rarely see a guy as wiry as Bradley Wiggins.
So there's a novelty value to it all, but also, finally, a gallery that reflects the fact that we all like different things, that enforced physical Fordism (any colour, so long as it's black; any female body, so long as it's thin; any male body, so long as it's muscly but not weird) doesn't really suit the marvellous variety of human desire.
