Here at The Weekly, we love the British. Our love is on show every month, in our coverage of the Royal family, our nod to their stews and pies in our food pages, and in our frequent tributes to the likes of Dame Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Colin Firth. We even have a British deputy editor.
There’s just one thing that annoys us about our former imperial masters. Australians might be poor losers, but the British are bad winners.
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Whenever the British beat Australia at sport, the crowing is extraordinary. “Isn’t it wonderful to see the Australians on their knees?” asked The Sun, after England’s Ashes victory.
From Giles Coren at the Daily Mail: “It is not so much that we can beat them resoundingly at cricket on their own soil and are set to retain the Ashes without breaking even the semblance of a sweat, as the sad fact that until we took it away from them, cricket was all they had,” he wrote.
The UK will taste unprecedented sporting success over the next month. Bradley Wiggins’ victory in the Tour de France is just a taster for what is likely to be a record medal haul at the Olympics, and one that is certain to top Australia’s.
Host countries always experience a medal spike, firstly because they’re allowed to enter more athletes in more events, and secondly because they pour a bucket-load of extra money into coaching and development.
As a result of this, the London Games are likely to prompt louder, more gleeful gloating than we have ever seen before.
The English don’t have much experience of success at sport, so they don’t wear it well.
They seem blind to the fact that bragging about beating Australia at cricket, for example, is like Kostya Tzu bragging about beating up an eight-year-old kid.
Great Britain invented the game, and has a population three times that of Australia; they should beat us most of the time.
The trumpeting of every victory just highlights their decades of humiliating failure.
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The United Kingdom will beat us at this Olympic Games, and so they bloody well should.
Please Britons, draw on the dignity for which you were once famous and be gracious about it.
Your say: Do you think Britons are bad winner or are Australians just bad losers?
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