Overshadowed by a handshake

The Winter Olympics have finished for another four years, and whereas we were all still reeling from the stunning medal haul after the Beijing Games, the lack of success for Team GB has made it difficult viewing at times, says Barney Ronay in The Guardian. So much so, that it was overshadowed by 'that handshake', or lack of it.

The Winter Olympics have been hard to watch at times. If there is a problem with the BBC styling them as primetime entertainment it is that without expert knowledge and deep background, what you are watching is essentially helmeted people engaged in multiple variations on the idea of slipping. To be fair, this is slipping taken to its absolute physical extreme, every event a struggle against the eternal slipping nemesis of falling over. The problem is that falling over generally makes for great primetime TV – entire careers have been built around it – while managing not to fall over is only so-so in a slot that just requires the Winter Olympics to be a bit more entertaining than Dancing On Ice.

There have been other problems. It is always easier for the BBC if it can peg these events to a bunch of medal-waggling MBEs in the making. But this time the Blondes in a Bob, the Ho in the Snow or the Geez on Skis have sullenly refused to materialise. With the corporation in the horrible position of having to justify pretty much everything it does, instead we have had Claire Balding bouncing around the streets of Whistler doing what amounts to a high-pressure sales job. Balding started out from a position of being incredibly excited. Later she changed tack, spending some time being no more than unbelievably excited. It was exhausting stuff and by the end an image of her swirling, toasted-golden-brown highlights, that foliage of honeyed bouffant, was burnt irrevocably on to my retina.

There were no such problems of hype-massage for Sky Sports, where the central televised act of the weekend was presented to Richard Keys borne aloft on a towering weather front of outsourced hot air. "A lot has been said and written," Keys sighed wearily, introducing live coverage of Wayne Bridge not shaking hands with John Terry. Sky could afford to hold a perfumed handkerchief to its nose in the build-up to the big shake. It was just a case of going with it. "Impossible to ignore of course," Keys sighed again, over some surprisingly poignant shots of JT looking sad and vulnerable in the tunnel beneath his new future-punk outlaw hairstyle. Keys had with him Mark Hughes and Glenn Hoddle, both of whom look literally made for TV, their huge, square heads filling the screen impressively. Within three minutes Hoddle would refer to "the Wayne Bridge situation", "the England situation" and finally "the handshake situation". Although with a whole hour of build-up situation to fill you did yearn for some alternative to these leonine middle-agers, who both seemed slightly nonplussed by it all.