Wednesday, August 1, 2007
The jokes that could backfire on sports that pedal in cash
Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer
There'll be a lot of chuckling in sporting circles this morning. All those involved in professional sport will be reading about the Tour de France, wagging their heads in disbelief, and saying: “God knows we've got problems in our sport – but they aren't on the same scale.” That's wrong. Every professional sport in the calendar has the same problem as the Tour de France. I don't mean that every sport has a problem with institutionalised doping – though there are more than you would think – rather, I mean that every sport contains the seeds of its own destruction.
There is something wrong with the Tour, with stage-race cycling, something massive. If you produce an event in which nobody cares who wins, you have created antisport. In subnuclear physics, when particle and antiparticle interact, the result is simultaneous annihilation. It is the same with sport and antisport.
All sports contain particles of anti-sport. The trick is to stop them interacting with sport. That is what failed to happen in the Tour de France; the result has been spectacular. The race lost the favourite, Alexandre Vinokourov, to a positive drugs test; the leader, Michael Rasmussen, was kicked out because he lied to his team about his whereabouts during training and there are, inevitably, questions about the winner-by-default, Alberto Contador.
This is sport gone silly, sport in which winning and losing no longer matter. Sport that has lost all credibility, sport people have given up on. How did it get like this? Because for year after year, the problem was ignored. Put on a good show, make the money, keep the wheels turning: that's what really matters. And so the problem was ignored, and if you ignore a sore toe now, you may reach the point when amputation of the entire limb is insufficient.
Is that relevant to other sports? You bet it is. The Tour de France is in potentially terminal decline because serious moral and sporting issues were ignored for the sake of financial expedient. There is not a sport in existence of which this is not true.
Take football: awash with money, a substance that in sufficient quantities dehumanises people every bit as much as drugs does. The sport is at present dealing with an obscene affair in which a player is owned – as if he were a racehorse – by a private individual.
What's more, football is increasingly failing to deliver good sport. It is failing to do so because its priority is making money, not making great football. The past two World Cups have been dire; the most recent European Championship was worse. The Champions League fails to deliver the excitement of the old European Cup, but it makes a lot more money. International football – the greatest thing football can offer – is being run down at the expense of the club game. Real Madrid went through the Beckham years as a fiscal rather than a sporting organisation.
Cricket delivered the World Cup this year, almost universally agreed to be the worst sporting event held. Money raised by the lucrative international game goes whizzing off to the counties so they can spend it all on Kolpak players and short-term success is far more important than building traditions of excellence. Meanwhile, the balance of bat and ball is constantly being nibbled away for the batsman's – but not the spectator's – benefit, while Test match cricket, the supreme form of the game, is losing ground.
Rugby union will shortly be delivering a bloated never-ending World Cup – Canada ? Romania ? Namibia ? Portugal ? – and as for the Schleswig-Holstein complexity of the club-versus-country debate in England , it's enough to make you despair not of sport, but of humanity itself.
Athletics and swimming fight their continuing war with drugs; tennis with the mundane quality of sub-stellar sport brought on by modern equipment; motor racing is about half-an-inch behind the Tour de France in terms of moral credibility. All sports have problems, all problems can become terminally destructive.
The trick, then, is not to say ho ho, cycling, pity their horrible luck. The point is to look for lessons and to learn them. The Tour de France went horribly wrong, because money was considered more important than sporting or moral questions – and that's the same in all professional sports.
All people involved in professional sport should read every word they can about this year's Tour de France, and then inspect the massive acreage of common ground. The point is not the details but the moral decay. Every person in professional sport should put hand on heart and ask: have we ever valued money more highly than good morals and good sport?
Then let us try and change that viewpoint before it destroys us: as it has already destroyed the Tour.