The Beginning of the End of Sport? And a Coda

 

The Rise and Fall of Cycling

The Tour de France in Ireland 1998 Newsflash. ‘The Festina team car stopped by police at the Belgian border found to contain large quantities of illegal drugs, including EPO. The team doctor has been taken into custody.’

More annoyed than shocked. EPO is the chemical equivalent of an oxygen mask for climbers on Everest, I think. Altitude training has the same effect. I recite the names of Festina riders, a litany to ward off evil. Virenque, Dufoux, Zulle, Bronchard, Herve, Meier, Moreau, Rous, Roussel, Gros and Neil Stephens. And humour myself, ‘This is a wind up’. Festina make watches. The joke backfires. Their watches are digital. And I had an ominous feeling… But perished it. Ireland was welcoming the tour I had followed on my pushbike twice in Belgium and several times in Paris, and on television for decades.

     (from Storytime, 2005)    

Ever since I was six and a half, I read the sports previews and results in the London Times. My father subscribed to the paper for inside stories from the foreign correspondents. Every recognized discipline was reported worldwide. The incremental logic of weighting the results helped me to explain, rather than anticipate, the unexpected. For instance, Ronnie Delaney, the rabbit in a world of hares, wins the 1500 meters at the Melbourne Olympics (1956).  Villanova University had developed his piston style to industrial standards and his times showed he was losing elite races by less and less. In the final two hundred his pistons were so pumped up they fired at the speed of light, so it was said. I was thirteen and, unlike the field of four-minute milers (Bannister and, Landy), not surprised. I saw the race on radio.

I excepted from my calculations horse racing, greyhound racing, and bull fighting, spectacles dominated by gambling and prone to corrupt preparation. Thus, unpredictable even to bookies. I didn’t care for boxing (hitting another human is closer to a crime than a sport), or wrestling which made a joke of strangulation. When the martial arts, like taekwondo, began to be reported, I considered hand to hand combat in pajamas as on par with pillow-fights between bored children. Not till the blithe and slight Charmie Sobers outwitted the summa wrestlers that, belatedly, it became a sport for me (circa 2004). Basketball I have discovered too late to include. The Harlem Globe Trotters came to Cork and made us feel too small to consider playing. The giants were more an extension of showbusiness. But here in France I discovered it’s not all about size. A local friend Serge plays for the department and during a charity event he threw up his three-year old daughter and caught her when fell through the open basket. Emma showed no fear and now, though she is smallish, plays for her college.  

Swimming and tennis were not included in my calculations. As an adolescent they were a duty. I played and swam with my father for his exercise. I loved both as it was unique time with him. But I had to accommodate them to suit his requirements. With tennis I avoided bang and crash shots and played a baseline game. With swimming we followed the daily tides in the Lee estuary. But neither were sport proper, that is, competitive.

Yachting was out. In Cork you needed to know the right people to participate in it. Harold Cudmore was a childhood friend. A wimpish boy (I played with him as had a crush on his sister), he ended up the commander of an American Cup yacht. I sailed a few times but sensed winds are so unpredictable that a dodo race is result, or disaster as with the Fastnet race in which I lost a few well-off schoolmates. It has since become the rich man’s investment sport for billionaires, and seemingly as pointless as private space travel jets. Not so. Putin’s oligarchs are using super yachts for money laundering in the West. Likewise, the Oil-rich tyrants of the Middle East are using ‘sport cleansing’ to distract the world from their human rights abuse.

The narrowing of sport to money manipulations has long ended the Olympics ideal.
Between 1912 and 1948 there were competitions for composing music and painting adjudicated by the host city. I rather fancy the idea of art as a sport, but judging from the panel that decides the Nobel Prize in Literature, a global referendum would be necessary to produce a worthy gold medal winner. Jack Yeats won a silver for Ireland and Ina Boyle a bronze. When Salvador Dali had been proposed for the final, Andre Breton mocked it with an acrostic of his name ‘Avida Dollas’. The Olympic committee dropped creative artists, realizing (at long last) they are professionals.       

When in the sixties the Soviet-bloc brought blatant cheating into the Olympics, I simply excluded them from my daily calculations. Second behind Andrea Annus, the hammer-thrower, was awarded my personal gold medal. Already alienated from the podium’s rank nationalism, I became a filter in the purification of sport.

Cheating existed in amateur days, but at least it did not pay. Miscreants would show up like a sore thumb with moloch muscles or red faces, and when the whistle blew, they would be disappeared into thin air. Being for glory, rather than greed, could be less reprehensible, I thought. Wrong from the start. Mock amateurism existed since Gentlemen became players, and the Gentlemen taught them how. The history of cricket from WG Grace on had its disgraces, largely kept secret until the 1960s when players took over. Then all hell broke loose with post-Packer’s racketeering. Mercifully, when I moved from living near Lords to France, cricket wasn’t part of my life. Occasionally amateur games in Holland and Portugal got reported in L’Equipe as a novelty. I could have caught up with a Sky subscription but cricket’s evaporation into financial air made me fly a kite.   

‘Money is the root of all evil’, intones the voice over at the beginning of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers (1946). It was reputably that of Ronald Reagan. Film noir may start out black and white, but gray areas (‘left-hand forms of crime’) emerge to sustain the narrative. The flea pits of my childhood rollicked with moral ambiguities. I transferred film noir plots to sport, and I wasn’t far wrong. State-driven professionalism in the Communist bloc were founded on collective baby farms producing athletes for political propaganda. My brother married a gymnast who was reared for the purpose. But it happened in the West with tennis fathers. China experimented with herbal diets which were drugs unknown to the testers. 

Since Packer and Sky, global television has made most sports part of the Capitalist business. More recently the Middle East Oil oligarchies with dictators and dire human rights have thrown the money madness into what’s called sports washing. And with more success than one would expect. So many top players are whores. Sport is a business and it’s a matter of ‘taking your opportunities’ right or wrong. Ethics now is ‘l’ethics’, that is, doing what you like. The truth about the past’s probity, and the present lack of it, haunts me. Have I been deceiving myself for almost sixty years?   

It is May 2024 and the Olympic flame is being carried from Greece to Paris, across France by renowned sportspersons, in Perpignan, a commercial arena has been opened in Perpignan for virtual sport. It is technologically state of the art and young and old are joining in troves. Maybe this is the future. The young are alienated from reality by their plastic so-called smart phones, and the old have nothing better to do.

Virtual sport essentially is playing with yourself. Artificial intelligence sets the rules. Sport in solitary confinement defeats its purpose. Engaging with others to test yourself.  The solitary vice comes to mind. I prefer not to think about it.

I still read the sports previews and results religiously, although I’m not a true believer anymore. Horse-racing gives me the most pleasure. I can imagine from the names what the horses are like. My favorite today is a French outsider, ‘Galopin de blot’, which translates the little rascal wants a hug. I will know tomorrow he gets one. At 100 to one I suspect he may have to do with an also-ran’s pat. But who knows …

As a boy I wanted to be a jockey. My sister wanted to learn to ride a pony and I attended the riding-school with her. I was making progress and could canter when she lost interest. So that was the end of my aspiration but later I wrote a poem about it (see, my Sporting Poems):

Coda

My Godfather Uncle Michael was sixteen in 1916. When news of the Easter Rising reached Galway, his mother saw him disappear out the gate on a white horse. The ride to Dublin is a hundred miles. She was standing at a French window.

Miichael always wanted to be a jockey. His father had a horse said to have finished the Grand National. But he grew to over six feet and that was the end of his aspiration. Nevertheless, horses remained his grand passion, and as the non-riding captain of the Irish equestrian team at the Munich Olympics, he shook hands with Hitler. My father didn’t speak to him again until I was born in 1943. I only met him at my baptism.

Ironically, he didn’t achieve his heart’s desire because he was too tall and I didn’t achieve mine in rugby because I was too small. But like him I didn’t turn my back on the sport.  Love will always find a way. Despite professionalism, it will as long as there are boys that dream, and lives to live. Michel de Montaigne writing about the Olympics (1580) said it all:

‘Pythagoras said such games with their arenas and crowds are like our lives. Some exercise their minds in order to win glory in the contests. Others bring merchandise there to sell for profit. There are some – and these are not the worst – whose only aim is to listen to how and why everything is thought, and to be spectators of other men’s ideas, in order to judge and regulate their own’.