Watching sport was put into perspective by the September 11 attacks Gavin Evans Any history of 2001 has to start with September 11, and so it is with sport. The impact of three aeroplanes on two towers and one military command centre may have no connection with fairways and fields, baseball diamonds and boxing rings, but its ramifications affected them all. For a while there was prevarication, premised on concern about public image and bottom lines. This prompted cancellations and postponements to show respect or because the players and viewers were too stunned to care about sport or too spooked to travel. Among many others the Ryder Cup was rescheduled for a year later while the year’s biggest boxing event, the middle-weight unification fight between Bernard Hopkins and Felix Trinidad in New York’s Madison Square Garden, was postponed for a month. Soon, however, it was back to business, albeit with minutes of silence, words of tribute and lusty renditions of the Star Spangled Banner. The ripples of September 11 are still being felt, particularly when international travel is involved. English cricketers, for instance, prevaricated about sending a squad to India. A more diffuse effect can be seen in sporting crowds indeed in sporting interest particularly in the United States. The impact of September 11 caused many Americans to conclude that the watching of sport was of no great importance, although some believe this merely exacerbated existing trends in American sport. Several codes are experiencing serious financial problems because of bloated payrolls, resistance to ticket prices and declining public interest. For the most part, however, the attack on the US and the”War on Terrorism” has had a minor impact on the international sporting calendar. It is worth recalling that World Wars I and II scuppered the Olympic Games in 1916, 1940 and 1944, and that the Cold War prompted tit-for-tat US and Soviet bloc Olympic Games boycotts in 1980 and 1984. It is probably safe to say that whatever happens to the Taliban and al-Qaida, Athens 2004 will proceed as planned.
Talking of the Olympics, 2001 finally saw the end to the reign of Juan Antonio Samaranch after 21 scandal-rich years as president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The former Spanish fascist functionary is credited with keeping the Olympic movement together and building on its status as the world’s biggest and richest sporting event, but this came at a high cost. He ruled through nepotism, assembling a team of committee members with political pasts as dubious as his own. He also turned a blind eye to massive corruption in the bidding process (until Salt Lake City took it too far in 1998), and allowed drug scandals to be swept under the rug. Samaranch lobbied hard for Belgium’s Jacques Rogge to succeed him, and in July he got his way when Rogge beat off challenges by Kim Un-yong of South Korea and Dick Pound of Canada to win the right to head the IOC for the next eight years. Pound, who had negotiated the IOC’s lucrative television and sponsorship deals and campaigned hard to clean up the Olympic image, resigned his posts as head of the World Anti-Doping Agency and IOC marketing chief.
Rogge, a surgeon and former Olympic sailor, has been untouched by scandal, despite being a Samaranch favourite. As British IOC member Craig Reedie put it:”If ever anyone came in with a blameless character, it was Jacques Rogge. There are no skeletons in his cupboard.” One of his major challenges will come in the fight against performance-enhancing drugs. The IOC introduced an effective blood and urine test for the endurance-improving drug EPO in time for the Sydney Olympics, but rather suspiciously backed off when scientists came up with a test to catch cheats using synthetic human growth hormone (HGH) a drug many sprinters, swimmers, throwers and weight lifters use with impunity. The dubious reason given at the time was lack of funds (they needed another 5-million spare change when you think of the kinds of sums swishing around in Sydney). Many suspect the real motivation was a fear that stars in blue-ribbon events like the 100m swimming and sprinting finals would be caught. Either that, or times would fall, which would lead to a drop in sponsorship funds. The IOC promised to pursue HGH testing after Sydney, but in 2001 determinedly kept it off the agenda, while stepping up efforts to catch EPO cheats in the less prestigious endurance events. You hardly needed a degree in endocrinology to interpret the results, say, in the World Athletics Championships in Edmonton in July. Athletes in the sprint and throwing events performed according to expectation some of them no doubt fuelled by HGH while those in the distance events delivered times well short of world records (perhaps because they could not risk taking EPO). The exception was the Russian 5 000m runner Olga Yegorova, whose times have improved dramatically over the past two years. When she tested positive for EPO before the games, the reason for this improvement became clear, but she managed to slip the net on a legal technicality and was booed on her way to gold.
There was, however, one area where long-distance running has made remarkable strides, apparently without the help of illegal stimulants: the women’s marathon. Some said it was impossible for a woman ever to break the magical two hour 20 minute barrier. But on September 30 Naoko Takahashi was watched by about 60% of the Japanese population as she smashed the world record with a winning time of 2:19.46 in the Berlin Marathon. A week later Kenya’s Catherine Ndereba obliterated that record with a time of 2:18.47 in the Chicago Marathon fast enough to have won her every men’s Olympic final until 1960. The athletics world championships confirmed the absolute dominance of Kenyan, Ethiopian and Moroccan men in distance running. These three countries won all five men’s running gold medals from 1 500m up, as well as five silvers and two bronzes. In other sports, however, we have seen what might be a changing of the guard. Rugby saw a break in the usual service Ireland beat England, England beat Australia, France and England beat South Africa. In football too, there was the hint of change. For several decades Germany has ranked as one of the game’s strongest nations not far behind Brazil. However, both of these countries are showing signs of significant decline, having a harder than expected run before qualifying for the World Cup. Germany’s 5-1 defeat by England in August was particularly significant, and they are now ranked only 11th in the world. And Holland, once one of the world’s best, failed to qualify. The 2001 picture would not be complete without following up on the scandals of 2000. Thankfully, there seems to have been some progress here at least in two of the sports worst hit, cricket and boxing. The major scandal in boxing last year centred on the exposure of the corrupt practices of the International Boxing Federation (IBF), whose head, Bobby Lee, sold ratings for bags of cash. Lee was jailed for two and a half years and the IBF was placed under court authority. As a result it was forced to clean up its act, and the other two major bodies began to curb some of their excesses in a bid to restore credibility. One positive spin-off was that everyone showed a new willingness to unify world titles. In cricket former South African captain Hansie Cronje was the only leading player to receive a lifetime ban, upheld in court, but the allegations covered most of the major cricketing countries, causing significant damage to the reputation of the game a view confirmed by the report of the International Cricket Council’s own investigation, headed by Sir Paul Condon, the former head of London Metropolitan Police. Overall, however, 2001 was a quiet year for world sport, made quieter by the events of September 11. Next year will be bigger and busier for sport football’s World Cup obviously the most significant event but also the Commonwealth Games, the European Athletics Championships, the Lennox Lewis vs Mike Tyson”superfight” and many others outside the usual sporting calendar.
We live in hope that they will all be exempt from the ramifications of war.