For most people on Earth today, sport plays a much larger emotional part in their lives than politics. We vote every four or five years, but we follow our teams every week.
The pattern of the modern year is dictated by the sporting season rather than the church calendar. Instead of Easter and Whitsun, we look forward to the Cup final, to the Open, to the Test, to Wimbledon and the accompanying rain.
In the United Kingdom, far more care about Thierry Henry’s departure from Arsenal than about a Cabinet reshuffle. When England managed to win the Ashes the September before last, London saw much wilder celebrations than at any election.
In Brazilian favelas or South African townships, football is the ruling passion of boys’ lives, quite apart from offering one in every few thousand a possible escape from poverty. Even in the UK nowadays it is football rather than fox-hunting that offers what Surtees called ”the image of war without its guilt”, although sometimes football can seem warlike enough.
Sport is one of the few things that cuts across class and intellect. The poorest and humblest are captivated by what athletes do with balls and bats, and so are the cleverest and grandest. Whenever I visit Lord’s I remember sitting in front of the pavilion with AJ Ayer, the philosopher, as he grumbled about Middlesex batsmen and Margaret Thatcher.
But if sport excites us and unites us, it also bitterly disappoints us. One game after another is stained by corruption, cheating and the horror of performance-enhancing drugs that, in the case of the blood-boosting hormone EPO, can enhance performance while killing you. Supporters hope their players will try to win. But at any cost?
This year the Tour de France began in London for the first time since the great race was founded in 1903. (The Tour often dips in and out of neighbouring countries. It has visited England twice, Ireland once and started in The Hague, Frankfurt and even Berlin.) If only this could have been a day for pure celebration.
For years bike racing, and the Tour in particular, has been shrouded in scandal with accusations of doping made against — and sometimes confessions of doping made by — half the Tour winners in living memory.
London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who helped secure the grand depart for the city, says doping is a thing of the past, which is not so much optimism as plain ignorance.
Just as last year’s Tour was about to begin a lurid scandal broke with the news of an investigation in Madrid into the ”sports doctor”, Dr Eufemiano Fuentes. Several riders were summarily ejected as a consequence, including favourites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso. Now the German cyclist, Jörg Jaksche, has told Der Spiegel that he too used Fuentes’s services.
Almost worse is the news of the Kazakh rider Alexandr Vinokourov, this year’s favourite and a man whose reputation has so far been unclouded. He has just admitted to being a client of Dr Michele Ferrari, another ”sports doctor” who has been accused, convicted and cleared of doping charges, and to whom any sane cyclist would give as wide a berth as possible.
But if cycling is in a bad way, it’s not alone. The Champions League was won this year by a team that should not have been competing at all — the victors, Milan, had been relegated for their part in Italy’s match-fixing scandal. But then the Italian football authorities were persuaded (rather like President George Bush with Lewis ”Scooter” Libby) that the punishment was excessive and Milan were allowed back.
Every year at MCC dinners, pompous speeches are made and toasts drunk to ”the spirit of cricket”, a phrase that may now need reinterpreting. Those of us who have always wondered why there is such a plethora of one-day cricket have learned the answer. One-dayers are an essential betting medium for the multibillion-rupee south Asian gambling business — and an irresistible source of corruption.
We have seen a South African cricket captain banned for life after he confessed to being involved in match-fixing — and anyone who thought Hansie Cronje’s subsequent death in an air crash had drawn a line under the affair was sadly wrong.
One senior British official working in international law enforcement has been quoted as saying he is sure that at least one of the games in the recent World Cup held in the West Indies was fixed. The game wasn’t identified by name, but many of us could take a stab at guessing. — Â