sport

sport is an amazing thing: it brings out the best and the worst in people. it unites and divides. sport can make you happy or it can leave you sad. it can have you on the edge of your seat or bore the tits off you. sport is filled with heroes and villains, winners and losers.
in short sport is a metaphor for life.

as i have gotten older my interest in sport has become more and more academic. i no longer understand the passion it brings out in people (though i will readily confess to welling up during sports movies). i now listen to the results of my favourite team and go ‘yay’ or ‘boo’ and then move on to whatever else i was doing. though i still get a little antsy when the english rugby union team takes to the field to play, and i let out a ‘coooooome on you booooys’ in hope that my voice of encouragement will help them win.

from the vantage point of the cynic it is easy to see where sport has gone wrong: money. the more popular the sport the more money there is in it (fishing doesn’t count – it is as much as a sport as train spotting is), the more money there is the bigger the amount of wankers who are involved.
you only have to look at formula 1 to see proof of that. lots of cars just going around and around and around and around. drivers claiming it is their skills that are paramount when really it is the technology that is in the car that really matters. save the environment and just have them race scalextric cars – it would be just as exciting and a lot cheaper to do.
or look at football where players can get paid enormous sums of money and then complain that they are asked to work too hard (yeah a couple of games a week and some training sessions… get real). or the fans of football who want their clubs to spend more money than is sensible but will complain the moment there is financial trouble with the club.

yet sport has shown itself to be a universal language, one that can bring us all together – such as when the world watched and gasped at the performances of usain bolt and michael phelps. we follow global sports stars such as david beckham, roger federer, tiger woods. sport has brought countries together – such as south africa, when the springboks won the rugby world cup.
yes sport has much to commend it.

sport’s change to a leading powerhouse financial brand, with global sponsorship, super rich performers, international support and reach has taken place in a world that is a lot less ordered than previously. now sport and politics don’t just mix they go hand in hand. sport is now a legitimate target for terrorists – financial and political. on the one hand you have businessmen getting involved in sport because they see it as a way to make a lot of money – they have no love for the sport as such, just what they can get from it. on the other hand you have political terrorists (or freedom fighters depending on where you stand) that will now attack sportsmen because they will create the shock and awe that the modern terrorist wants.

most recently we saw that with the africa cup of nations when the togo team bus came under attack, with the result that two of the party were killed. unsurprisingly the togo government withdrew their team from the tournament. at the time there was much sympathy directed at the togo team.

now it seems that the reward for being shot at and having members of the their delegation killed is that they are being banned from the next two africa cup of nations tournaments. seems perfectly reasonable to me, in a warped and twisted way. the confederation of african football has chosen a letter of the law type approach – something to do with state interference in sport meaning that the team has to be banned. of course what should have happened was that togo be allowed to play in the tournament because anyone with half a mind could see why they withdrew.
commonsense is something that sports administrators seem to lack.
one would have expected fifa to pop up and say something but i guess joseph s blatter was more concerned with women’s football wearing tighter tops than to point out to one of the affiliated organizations that it was making a bit of a tit of itself by a totally stupid ban.
blatter, like the rest of the world, must be hoping that the 2010 world cup in south africa is like the 1995 rugby world cup there – successful and with a feel good story for africa.

that is the other thing about sport – it encourages you to live in hope.