By Neil Drysdale,
These are desperate times for those of us who like to view sport as something to be celebrated. Wherever you cast your gaze, from football to rugby and Formula One to snooker, there are ongoing controversies, involving cheating and perceived wrong-doing, by some of the biggest personalities in their pursuits.
Dean Richards, the former director of rugby at Harlequins, and Flavio Briatore, the former team director with Renault’s F1 organisation, have been the most high-profile casualties of the summer’s blood-letting to date, but one suspects that the rancour and recriminations will continue unabated, across a range of pursuits, while the shadows lengthen in the next few weeks.
When the news broke of Richards’ involvement in instructing his players to use fake-blood capsules to feign injury during matches, it was easy to imagine that this was a one-off stratagem, dreamt up in a moment of weakness by the former England and Lions star. Yet, even after receiving a three-year global ban for his part in “Bloodgate”, Richards insists that the problem is rife in the sport and seems to be dwelling under the misapprehension that his only crime was to be caught.
A similar ambivalence has been shown by top-flight football managers, such as Arsenal’s Arsene Wenger, following his player, Eduardo’s, willingness to engage in simulation (or diving, as it used to be called) to gain an unfair advantage over opponents.
And, on the F1 beat, some observers have expressed surprise that anybody should be surprised at the Machiavellian tactics employed by Briatore and his Renault colleagues, who ordered their driver, Nelson Piquet Jnr, to crash deliberately during last year’s Singapore Grand Prix. It’s as if these people have been lingering in the toy department for so long they believe that anything is permissible and that they inhabit a world where nothing is taboo if it offers an edge.
When rugby turned professional, back in 1995, some were fearful that the sport would career down a slippery slope, and, to some extent, these fears have been justified. In a game where there is so much scope for driving a bus through rules, clubs have routinely transgressed in a variety of areas, from telling their front-row players to feign injuries if their scrum is creaking, to using the now-discredited blood capsules.
Yet it wouldn’t do to pretend that everything was sweetness and light in the old amateurism days. In the 1980s, for instance, a prominent Scottish forward was ordered by his then coach to take out an English rival at Murrayfield and duly launched into a pre-meditated assault within a few seconds of the match commencing. Nowadays, that kind of violent behaviour would be met with a swingeing ban for the perpretator. Back then, however, it was viewed as a jolly jape, something for the lads to laugh about over a post-match pint or ten.
And yet, and yet, one wonders whether something essential has not been lost in the process of moving from a situation where winning wasn’t regarded as the be-all and end-all, to the present obsession with victory at all costs. Even those with little interest in F1 will accept that when the likes of Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart and Graham Hill used to dominate the fast lane in the 1960s and 1970s, there was an unwritten code of honour among the participants, who had to trust each other instinctively in an environment where two out of three drivers lost their lives between 1967 and 1973.
To these fellows – and sadly, Stewart is the only one still with us – the actions of Piquet and Briatore would have been inconceivable. Heaven knows, there was sufficient chance of these competitors suffering a life-threatening crash – or worse – without going out of their way to join in a Faustian pact and deliberately drive their car into a wall. But, even if we take Piquet at face value, he appears to think he deserves credit for exposing the scam, when he could have refused to embrace the scheme in the first place. The same applies to Tom Williams, the Harlequins winger, who blew the whistle on Richards’ rotten practices, but only after he had tried to gain financial rewards from the club for keeping his mouth shut.
It all begs the question: where is sport headed? Must it necessarily follow that the death of Corinthianism leads to all the poisons in the mud hatching out? Of course, there will always be grey areas, such as in the case of the inter-gender athlete, Caster Semenya, whose victory in the 800m at the world championships in Berlin last month has made him/her a national hero in South Africa, but has provoked a furore every where else. But surely, the most important thing for any sport is that it retains its credibility, that when we watch A racing B or C, that we believe they are operating within the rules. If we don’t, then we may as well declare that everybody’s on drugs, or using illegal supplements, or conniving to fix matches, or naturally pre-disposed to con referees and umpires.
And, if that materialises, then a sporting audience tends to dry up. It happened with wrestling in the 1960s, and many former Tour de France enthusiasts have grown weary of a pastime dominated by hormone monsters. Athletics, too, has been diminished and tainted by suspicion, rumour and positive drugs tests, while horse racing’s image has taken a battering during the last couple of years. In the final analysis, the public may be gullible, to a point, but they generally know when something smells fishy.
In which light, the likes of Richards, Briatore and Eduardo – even though the latter escaped censure, following UEFA’s ridiculous U-turn on Monday – are doing worse than merely cheating the public. They are cheating themselves and also damaging the interests of everyone with fairness and integrity in their domain. It might be true that money and professionalism have had a negative impact in standards of behaviour. But ultimately, we can’t turn back the clock and, in any case, it is the amateur status of F1’s stewards and marshals which has invited so much criticism in recent years. All we can conclude is that the day a sport begins taking its audience for granted is the day it starts to die.
