Simon Barnes

From Simon Barnes in Sydney

The Magic Christian has done it. Jonathan Edwards, sport's No 1 stand-up-and-be counted Christian, won the gold medal in the triple jump tonight, thus filling the one serious gap in his CV.

It is turning into a good games for elderly Brits: after Steve Redgrave completed his life-work at the age of 38, Edwards reached the summit of his own athletic career at 34.

Jonathan Edwards celebrates winning the gold medal in the men's triple jump
© AP

In an extraordinary night for that less-than-high-profile discipline of the hop, step and a jump, there were three British triple-leapers through to the final eight. Larry Achike was lying in bronze medal position till the sixth and final round, but this is a cruel corner of the sporting world.

You don’t need to catch your opponents up gradually, you can do so in one bound, or at least in three. Two Cubans who had underperformed all night suddenly found stride and rhythm to overtake him in the last round, which is the one when you are supposed to be tired.

Achike ended up fifth, which is worth a cheer. Phillips Idowu, the third Briton, was, astonishingly, jumping in his first-ever senior international. He must think cricket’s an easy game, as Richie Benaud always said of precocious achievement. He finished sixth and will still be jumping when Edwards is old and grey.

Though of course, Edwards is already old and grey, refusing to dye his hair through a rather splendidly perverse reverse vanity. He is one of the most extraordinary-looking athletes I have ever seen, in so far as he doesn’t really look like an athlete at all.

His face had the pinched, almost ill-green look: the look of a man on a bad channel crossing trying to convince himself that he is a good sailor, or of an athlete of a certain age reaching a peak of hard training. During the tensions of competition, he looked at times as if about to vomit.

But then he would relax and throw off one of those disarming little smiles, as if all the ironies were still intact and he was aware of the absurdity of the whole thing. “It’s just jumping into a sandpit,” he once said. All sport is basically jumping into a sandpit, but few athletes dare to realise it.

The big jump came in the third round, after he had put down a good solid marker for the first and followed it with a decent increase in the second. It really is the most extraordinary discipline, this. It is all about bodily control at the highest possible speed.

You hit the board flat out, at around 40kph, and then must perform this series of manoeuvres while maintaining balance, control, and above all, speed. Edwards put his annus mirabilis of 1995 in which he set the world record, down to “the double-arm-shift”, the co-ordination of both arms to give him special oomph in the take-off of the final jump phase.

He has subsequently lost this, but there was at least a hint of it in that decisive jump. It was a fine performance of sustained concentration as the stadium was going berserk with Cathy Freeman’s race and then with her medal ceremony, a marvellous women’s pole vault competiton and Michael Johnson striding his stuff.

It is not surprising to find a triple-jumper turning to God. The fraught nature of the competition would make the most confirmed scientific materialist put his hands together and pray to the God he didn’t believe in. You get a great deal of time to think things over, and to watch your fellow competitors as they take their places on the runway, some with faces of impassive calm, others full manic, adrenaline-stoned aggression.

Edwards’s personal tic is to hold his arms a little distance from his side, palms slightly flared. It is a small sketch of wings: a suggestion that if God were ever to consider lending him wings, now wouldn’t be a bad time.

I wonder how much actual praying Edwards does during competition; how much he did tonight. To ask would be to intrude on sacred mysteries, but if I were him, I would chant Psalm 90 to myself before every jump: And I will raise you up on eagle’s wings.

He is a man of strange mien: gawky, and apparently rather unco-ordinated, with no intimidating chest to throw at his rivals. And there is this odd sense of irony that descends on him at his biggest moments. You will remember the huge, theatrical shrug - the only theatrical thing about him - when he broke the world record for the second time in the world championships of 1995.

After he hit his big jump this time, he shook his head, as if at the absurdity of it all, and gave a rueful smile. Perhaps his great strength is this extraordinary sense of perspective in the heat of battle, this inner certainty of its ultimate pointlessness in the eye of God.

This sense of detachment is, if you like, a God-given gift, because it certainly comes from Edwards’s personal view of the nature of God. It is what allows him to pass the If test, and keep his head and deal with triumph and disaster with the same slightly lop-sided ironical smile.

And perhaps it is also what lifts him - literally lifts him - in the heat of competition. Eagle’s wings. A golden eagle, naturally.