Tuesday 28 April 2015

PROUD TO BE BRITISH!

I am not always proud to be British; certainly there are times when we are in Spain that I speak more Czech than I ever do here in the CR, for fear of being thought to be from the same place as some of the boys and girls that make their way down to the sun each summer.   But after a weekend in front of the TV watching two of my favourite sports, I have the same proud feelings as I had during the London Olympics – the Brits are really good at these huge occasions!

Saturday saw the retirement of the greatest jockey of all time, A.P. McCoy.   I know that not everyone is as horse-racing mad as I am so they may not have taken much notice of this, and certainly outside of the UK it probably didn’t make many of the newspapers, but had AP (as he is known) been involved in one of the more popular sports (football, tennis, golf) news of his retirement would have made it to the front page of newspapers all over the world, since he is truly a legend.  

In the UK, where he is as famous as Roger, Tiger or Lionel, AP’s final day before hanging up his boots was marked with a festival of racing, with many of the best horses in the country taking part (not that they would have known the relevance) and all the biggest names in the sport turning out to say goodbye, alongside nearly 20,000 spectators.  And not a dry eye in the house (at the racecourse or ours!).   Since most jockeys have retirement forced on them – injuries, loss of nerve, inability to starve themselves any more – I do wonder, though, whether AP, who is still fighting fit, will find retirement a bit too dull and we will suddenly hear about him coming out to ride in one or other big race next year.  We shall see.    

Having only just recovered from the emotion of all that, we were back in front of the TV on Sunday morning to watch the London Marathon. Having run in eight half marathons myself, and been the Prague International Marathon’s PR agency for four years until 2012 (and with a partner that runs the marathon every year), watching marathons on television is probably a bit more interesting to us than it is to most people – let’s face it, watching a group of people running along a road for 2 hours and more is not so exciting – but the London Marathon is something else.     

Sunday was particularly special, as not only did it show off the city in all of its splendor, but it also saw another great British sports person hanging up their shoes – this time Paula Radcliffe, the marathon world record holder, who, whilst no longer running professionally, decided to have her last run in London in amongst the other 30,000 plus runners (but still finishing in a near to professional time)!  Again, most of the hundreds of thousands of spectators were cheering her on, and again most of the people involved were in floods of tears at the end.  


What does all of this have to do with marketing and management?   Well, not so much.  But what these wonderful events prove is that it is not enough just to put on a show – you need the people and the emotion to make them into something really special.   Which, in our world, is probably the case with most of what we do.