Star Struck

Ruffled

Astrology. What in the fuck, I must ask, is this all about? Because while I have never believed in this rape of the heavens via the Daily Mirror puzzles page, I've always been happy to let believers carry on their merry way. However, this week I was privy to a stunning display of astrological insanity via Radio 2, where some star-botherer or other attributed various Olympic successes to whether Uranus was being intruded upon by Neptune.

This makes me want to run through the nearest astrology convention with a sharpened telescope. Apart from the fact that astrology is a load of old cock, it's even more old and cockish when its used to explain modern sporting prowess. If you want to believe that your 40-something love life is shit just because your mother's waters broke on the 'wrong' date, you go for it. Knock yourself out. But if you want to believe that Bolt or Ennis or Dujardin won gold for the same reason then you are as bananas as Fifes's head office.
For a start, to believe that medal-winning Olympians are successful only because of their star signs is the equivalent of believing that you'll only pass your exams if you wear your lucky knickers. It's taking a sport - the product of science, discipline and arse-splittingly hard work - sprinkling it with fairy dust and announcing that success is down to the 'little folk'.
And if that's not enough to set you in retrograde motion, it's also deeply and pitifully patronising. Jesus, imagine being a sportswoman, nurturing your talent, practising for hours every day, travelling to meets and nursing injuries until you win an Olympic medal only to be told that the win was all down to you being a fucking Capricorn? I dunno about Pluto being in transit but I'm as sure-as-shit that my fist would be. Then again, the guilty astrologer would know this because they'd have predicted it in Grazia a week earlier.
In fact, such is my disdain for astrology that I don't even know Kraken Junior's star sign. That's partly because it has as much relevance as a bird taking a shit three thousand miles away. It's also partly because, for me, looking at the stars is about science. You know, the evidence-based pursuit that means one fuck of a lot more than the fictional representation of the night sky. Show me evidence that being a Taurean has influenced my career, depression and love of anchovies and I may start to listen. 
Until then, chart-twiddlers, no. Just no. Astrology does not have influence over the Olympics because, unlike the Olympics, astrology is based upon fuck all. Unless, of course, you want to line up the runners, swimmers and pole vaulters according to their star sign rather than country. But that would never work because astrology would also be put to the test and, by Christ, would it lose.