Step aside, Ron Weasley! The nation has a new set of flame-maned heroes now thanks to London 2012.
Long jumper Greg Rutherford, cyclist Ed Clancy, gymnast Daniel Purvis and mountain biker Annie Last, have all dealt powerful blows to “gingerism” — one of the last socially accepted forms of discrimination.
On the internet’s Urban Dictionary, “ginger” is described as an “idiotic (and not really insulting) slur against people with red hair, employed in Britain, Canada, and other heavily Anglocentric cultures”. Actually, it is a broader and older prejudice than that: the Greek philosopher Aristotle claimed those for whom Factor 50 was born were of bad character: “witness the foxes”.
But when Rutherford jumped to gold on Saturday, he earned an outpouring of Twitter love. The 25-year-old, who calls himself the Ginger Wizard and looks like How I Met Your Mother actor Neil Patrick Harris but with a strawberry element to the blondness, was dubbed “one hot ginger” and “ginger sex on a stick”. And Rutherford wears his rusty hair with pride, wanting his win to inspire the next generation to copy “that pretty good ginger guy”.
A few days earlier, Purvis had helped Great Britain take bronze in the men’s team gymnastics with a supreme floor routine while he was cheered on by the country’s most famous man with cantaloupe-coloured hair, Prince Harry. Then there’s Clancy, who won both a gold and a bronze in the Velodrome, and the handsome Ben Rhodes in the sailing.
Jonathan Swift wrote of redheads that they “much exceed in strength and activity” those of us without a Titian-tint. But it seems Ginger Power (think Thor, Boudicca and Churchill) is innate, not acquired. Hence Asafa Powell, who sported an odd tufty orange goatee, was injured in the 100m final on Sunday night.
So has this success inspired the next generation of ginger Olympians? Well, I’ll leave the last few words to a red-haired teenager who posted on Twitter on Saturday: “Seeing a ginger in the Olympics #hope.”
