A towering achievement

I’m feeling a little sorry for Henrik Rummel, the US Olympic rower who was photographed on the podium with a raging stiffy. Overcome with embarrassment, he foolishly tried to deny the obvious in an interview with a celebrity gossip site. One might say his performance was predictably wooden. I couldn’t resist showing the podium picture to the manager of the safari camp.

“If that isn’t a boner, the sausage I ate for breakfast was a noodle,” he said.

For once, I had to agree with him. What Rummel should have done was brazen it out. Instead of getting his girlfriend to back up his flimsy evasions, he should have used her as an excuse for his unplanned turgidity. Suppose he had responded to the picture with the following statement:

“I guess my brain was thinking about the medal I won, but my Johnson was thinking about Melinda’s hooters.”

He would have come across as a cool dude rather than a dissembling nitwit.

Public relations is an art I mastered in my circus days. The rules I followed were: (i) answer all your fan mail; (ii) ignore all your hate mail; (iii) cultivate your image by disseminating titbits of personal information. The unwashed human masses love hearing quirky snippets of news about the celebrities they revere. Here are a couple of facts about myself I released through carefully chosen media outlets:

Gorilla Bananas has a bust of Lord Nelson in his trailer.

Gorilla Bananas can play ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ on his recorder.

Needless to say, my fans lapped it up like cream from the she-elephant’s udders. As I grew more media savvy, I cashed in on the product placement scam by feeding the press headlines such as:

Gorilla Bananas uses Harmony Hairspray.

Few of the Olympic medal-winners possess such skills, which is why they tend to make a hash of their public pronouncements. Even Usain Bolt, who is used to being in the limelight, sounded like a bit of a dick after winning the 100 metres. If I were Bolt’s manager, I’d tell him to avoid all unscripted interviews and project his persona solely in TV commercials.

“Be realistic, Bolty,” I would say to him. “A professional scriptwriter will feed you far better lines than anything you could say when speaking off the cuff.”

Bolt would probably be too arrogant to follow my advice, but at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing I’d done my job whenever he yammered away like a jackass.

Some Olympic medal-winners are so jejune in their public statements that it actually makes you like them more. This is what Helen Glover, the 26-year-old British rowing champion, said to the BBC during her victory parade in Cornwall:

"Oh my God, I'm so excited and the rain's stopped, so that's good. I said I wasn't going to cry at all, but I did, once.”

Heh, what a sweet little girl! One has an avuncular urge to buy her an ice-cream and take her to the funfair.

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The flame and the sausage

Hats off to the Lincolnshire mayoress who greeted the Olympic torch in a sausage costume. The fact that many onlookers mistook her for a phallus was not her fault. People with filthy minds will see what they want to see. She has earned my hairy esteem for treating this silly Olympic charade in the spirit it deserves. Ferrying a flame in fifty different directions so people can prance about conceitedly is not a spectacle to be taken seriously.

The Olympic Games are ridiculous, of course. Humans that run and jump for sport are pathetic wannabes – I could put together a team of chimpanzees that would win every track and field event. Why can’t humans play games based on their own survival skills? I am 100% certain that no ape could milk a cow as well as a human. Any chimp that tried to do it would probably squirt milk in his eye before getting a hoof in the mouth. Humans awarding each other medals for bipedal motion are like rabbits giving themselves prizes for landscape gardening.

At this point, you’ll remind me that the Olympics have a proud history going back to the ancient Greeks. What you forget is that the games of classical antiquity were conducted in the nude. Strict rules were required to prevent unsportsmanlike conduct – according to Herodotus, laughing at an opponent’s willy resulted in immediate disqualification. Be that as it may, the modern games have not kept faith with these hallowed traditions for purely pragmatic reasons. If they hadn’t dispensed with the nudity, my guess is that only Germany and Papua New Guinea would participate.

I say this because the Germans are famous for stripping off at the slightest excuse. A recent example of their fondness for doing things naked was seen in the town of Suderlugum, where a new supermarket offered a free trolley of groceries to the first 100 customers who did their shopping in the nude. They got more than they bargained for when half the town turned up naked.

“We were a bit overwhelmed,” said the manager. “We were expecting maybe 10 or 20, but absolutely everyone was in the nude. It was fun but I wouldn't want to do it every day, although it would cut down on shoplifting.”

Call me a suspicious ape, but the manager’s remarks sound evasive to me. A marketing exercise in which 100 customers get a windfall and everyone else leaves empty-handed doesn’t make sense. You’ve got to spread the goodies widely to make such promotions work.

His use of the word “fun” reveals the true nature of this offer. Let’s assume that 20% of Germans are exhibitionists, another 20% are voyeurs, and a further 20% are both. You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see that any kind of naked event will be immensely popular, with or without free groceries.

All of which suggests that the Germans will use the Olympics as another excuse for group nudity. Anyone planning to go there for a holiday should expect to get invited to naked barbecues in which fat middle-aged men called Gunter will offer them flame-grilled sausages. Remember to blow on them before biting.

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