Heroes and villains

19 April 2024

Villain
Nike, whose new outfits for America’s female Olympic athletes leave little to the imagination. Lauren Fleshman, a former 5,000m national champion, wrote on Instagram that the high-cut panty line would leave wearers worrying about “pube vigilance”. Long-jumper Tara Davis-Woodhall said simply: “Wait my hoo haa is gonna be out.”

Hero
Foreign office officials, who are considering sending migrants to Costa Rica rather than Rwanda. It’s a “cunning PR move”, says Giles Coren in The Times – steering away from a country we bien-pensant Londoners associate mainly with “genocide” towards one where we’d rather like to go on holiday. “Were the government now to moot Tuscany, Whistler and St Barts, I’m sure a great many liberal minds would be put at rest.”

Villains
Cannibals in Papua New Guinea, for eating Joe Biden’s uncle. The US president said this week that 2nd Lieut Ambrose J Finnegan was shot down during World War Two “in an area where there were a lot of cannibals”. He says the body was never recovered, but that “the government went back, when I went down there, and they checked and found some parts of the plane”. Official records suggest Finnegan actually died when his plane suffered engine failure and crashed into the Pacific.

Hero
Victoria Beckham, who turned 50 this week. She’s “the ultimate grafter”, says Hilary Rose in The Times. By her own admission, Posh Spice was never the most talented singer or dancer – but she “made a fortune from it nevertheless”. Everyone laughed when she launched her own fashion brand, but she’s “still plugging away” 16 years later. And when you meet her, she’s “charming and professional” in a way that most other celebrities really aren’t. “So kudos, Posh. Happy birthday. Go wild and sniff a slice of cake. You’ve earned it.”

Villain
Cricket, according to Jonathan Agnew, who has railed against the sport’s switch to gender-neutral terminology. “I always call a woman batsman a ‘batter’,” the BBC’s departing chief cricket correspondent told an interviewer. “But why can’t a man playing a man’s game be a ‘batsman’?” He made the same complaint about the Ashes – a name that emerged from the 1882-3 series between the England and Australia men’s teams – being renamed the “Men’s Ashes”. “It’s an event. It happened. It’s not the ‘Men’s Battle of Hastings’, is it?”

Hero
Ronald Reagan, for “saving the people of Israel last weekend”, says Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal. When, in 1983, the Republican president announced plans to develop defence systems that could shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, he faced stiff opposition – not least from a young US Senator called Joe Biden. The anti-nuke system, known as Star Wars, never materialised, but the project did lead to Israel developing its own anti-missile defences – which helped shoot down 99% of Iran’s rockets and drones on Saturday.

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