PICK OF THE WEEK
DALEY: OLYMPIC SUPERSTAR
iPlayer
As the Paris Olympics open, get in the mood with Vadim Jean’s excellent feature-length portrait of Daley Thompson. According to Sebastian Coe, the decathlete who won gold at Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984 is “by a country mile, the best Olympian we have ever had in the UK”.
The 65-year-old Thompson is an amiable, grizzled figure; still mischievous and charming, but a long way from the swaggering giant that bestrode the world of athletics for the first half of the 1980s. A documentary celebration of his achievements is long overdue.
The decathlon – 100m, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400m, 110m hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500m – makes unbelievable demands, across two days, of the human physique and mental fortitude. Even at the 1976 Olympics, as Caitlyn Jenner (who won gold as Bruce Jenner) recalls amusingly, the young Thompson was desperate for training tips. After retiring, Jenner predicted that the next great decathlete would be this hungrily ambitious Brit.
Thompson did indeed go on to incarnate the glamour and the excitement of early 1980s Britain. But he was also the victim of its racism and divisiveness. Though he took risks as a prankster – whistling the national anthem on the podium at the 1984 Olympics, for instance – his subsequent vilification in the press was way out of proportion.
The cost to his family of his obsessive focus was high. As Sharron Davies (denied gold in the 1980 400m individual medley by an East German swimmer who later admitted having taken drugs) puts it: “It took him till he was 65 to grow up – but there you go”.
It is affecting to see Thompson now speaking of his love for his children – his 31-year-old son Elliot was British decathlon champion in 2022 – and his coach, Bob Mortimer, who he says was “the closest thing to a dad” that he had. Jürgen Hingsen, the mighty West German athlete who was once his mortal rival, is now like a brother to him; Hingsen calls Thompson “my better half”.
Thompson is not as embedded in national memory as he should be, and this film goes some way to correcting that omission. Had he not been suffering multiple injuries, he would probably have won a third successive Olympic gold in Seoul in 1988.
A truly great Briton: where is his knighthood?
STREAMING
LADY IN THE LAKE
Apple TV+
Baltimore, Thanksgiving, 1966: nine-year-old Tessie Durst goes missing and Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), a middle-class Jewish housewife unhappy with her life, finds the case deeply troubling – and is determined to find the child, which, in horrific circumstances, she does.
Meanwhile, Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram, superb) seeks to make a mark in Black civil rights activism and politics but is held back by her association with numbers-running gangster Shell Gordon (Wood Harris).
Her husband, Slappy (Byron Bowers) is too busy pursuing his ambitions as a comedian to support their family, so Cleo works multiple jobs to put food on the table. And then she, too, is found dead.
Maddie leaves her husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), and teenage son, Seth, (Noah Jupe), moves to “The Bottom”, Baltimore’s Black neighbourhood, and tries to break into journalism. In the offices of the fictional Baltimore Star she encounters antisemitism and sexism, but is relentless in her pursuit of the two cases.
Based on the 2019 novel by Laura Lippman, this seven-part adaptation by Alma Har’el is a superior noir-ish excavation of a city in social flux, with spliced plots and plenty of twists.
BOOK
Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want To Run The World,
by Anne Applebaum
Allen Lane
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum is one of the best political journalists writing today, and her latest book is a masterly analysis of modern autocracy.
“Nowadays,” she writes, “autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services – military, paramilitary, police – and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.”
Instead of the geopolitical blocs of the 20th century, we should track the morphing connections and shifting alliances between states such as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe; understanding that the shared objective is not the formation of axes or the triumph of a global ideology, but the enrichment of oligarchies, the repression of dissent and the intermittent disruption of rival democratic nations. As Applebaum puts it, it is a world of deals, not ideals.
This is a rigorously researched, bracing and realistic book. “There is no liberal world order any more,” she writes, “and the aspiration to create one no longer seems real.”
But she is by no means fatalistic, urging free nations to confront the complicity of financial, legal and communications professionals in enabling Autocracy, Inc.
She urges the formation of “an international anticorruption alliance” and “a war against autocratic behaviours”.
You can hear Matt Kelly and me talking to Anne Applebaum on this week’s Friday episode of The Two Matts.
