The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
Sport is the opiate of the people
Sport in 2016 provided us with a welcome respite from a world that seems to be spinning rapidly out of control, writes Damian Stack
FOR so many 2016 was an
annus horribilis. It was the year of Brexit. It was the year Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. It was a year of terrorism, war, pestilence and disease. It was a year all four horsemen of the apocalypse will fondly remember.
Against this backdrop, against images of unimaginable suffering in places like Aleppo and Sana’a, the world of sport seems a trifling concern and, of course, it is. It doesn’t matter and that is its glory and its saving grace.
It’s often said – paraphrasing and bastardising Karl Marx – that sport is the opiate of the people. It’s said in a way that suggests there’s something wrong with that. A tut tutting rebuke of its supposed corrosive effect in distracting the proletariat from the perfidies of capital.
And, yeah, there’s probably a certain truth to that. Just as the Caesars used the games in the Colosseum and races in the Circus Maximus to entertain and distract the masses, modern sports fulfil a similar role. Instead of gladiators we have footballers. Instead of charioteers we have racing drivers.
That being the case should not 2016 have been the year for the scales to fall from our eyes and see sport in a different light entirely? Well yes... but not for the reason you might think.
As we’ve said its essential inconsequence is the very glory of sport. In 2016, as never before, we needed distraction, we needed something to enjoy on its own terms. Not so much to blind ourselves from the reality of our world, as much as to provide ourselves a respite from it.
To remind ourselves that for the great majority of us life goes on, that the globe keeps spinning. If all sport does is remind us of the value of wonder and awe, of exhilaration and delight then it will have done its job.
Sport in 2016 did all that and more. Not that there weren’t intrusions of the real world into that of sport. Echoes of Russian hacking can be found in that country’s doping scandal. Concerns about Qatar’s human rights record continue to dog preparations for the 2022 World Cup.
More than anything else, however, sport has provided us with moments of beauty and joy, provided us with moments of transcendence and human connection. Even when pain and sadness and loss have intruded upon the world of sport – as inevitably happens from time to time – it can bring us together to remind us of who we are.
A week after Anthony Foley passed in Paris, Munster hosted Glasgow in Thomond Park. It was part wake, part celebration, part rebirth as the Red Army romped to a victory that would propel them to a seven game unbeaten run. In grief and tragedy Munster and the Munster faithful rediscovered themselves, rediscovered what it is to be Munster.
Chicago, of all places, played host to one of the most remarkable stories of the year a couple of weeks later and, no, we don’t mean the Cubs winning the World Series for the first time since Al Capone was in short pants.
In Soldier Field Ireland, for the first time ever, won a game of rugby football against the New Zealand All Blacks. To wait one hundred and eleven years for a win meant that when it came it was something quite remarkable.
Even so there was the slightest feeling of anti-climax. Was this it? Was this what all the fuss was about? What now? What next? To win again, to win more, to win better. The principal thing that victory achieved was to demystify the All Blacks and if that’s all it does its worth its weight in gold and more.
It’s in the struggle as much as anywhere else that the joy of sport is to be found as perverse a notion as that may seem. A sense of anti-climax after the initial elation of victory is not an altogether uncommon experience.
An experience that someday soon Mayo might enjoy, if that’s the right word for it. No team knows better the struggle than they and, even if victory in the end turns out not to be all it’s not cracked up to be, they deserve the chance to find that out for themselves.
For all the lamentations that the 2016 championships – in both football and hurling – were below par they gave us some brilliant moments, some brilliant days, some brilliant stories.
They gave us Austin Gleeson’s audacious and outrageous talent. They gave us the Tipperary footballers. They gave us the rise of Waterford. They gave us a football final and replay worthy of the occasion.
Only Mayo could score two own-goals in the first half of an All Ireland final. Only Mayo could live to tell the tale. Adversity, struggle, that’s their thing. Nobody bounces back better than they do and, perhaps, that’s part of the problem. When there’s always next year, there isn’t quite the fierce urgency of now.
That’s probably a little unfair on a Mayo team who have an abundance of character, but there is something to be said for pushing yourself beyond what you thought to be your limits to win in the here and now.
To win his world championship Nico Rosberg pushed himself harder than he’d ever pushed himself before, in the knowledge that in the event of victory he’d walk away from Formula 1.
It meant piling upon himself more pressure than otherwise he would have been under. It’s what he needed to give himself that all important edge over Lewis Hamilton, who only once before had been bested over the course of a season by a team mate.
Rosberg’s retirement just days after claiming the title in Abu Dhabi caught everybody on the hop. It served to remind us that sport, as brilliant and all as it is, is not the be all or end all. It is what it is and we rightly revel in it. Bring on 2017.
In grief and tragedy Munster and the Munster faithful rediscovered what it is to be Munster