The trouble with the truth
their peers; and sport is populated by fiercely competitive people, some of whom don’t like each other.
Two men supposedly behaving badly in sport this week have revealed as much about our ability to accommodate those inconvenient truths and the freedoms that underpin them, as they have about the sportsmen themselves.
Rugby star Israel Folau is a deeply religious person who doesn’t care much for homosexuality.
You probably picked up his religious conviction from his first name; the latter was clarified when he tweeted, in response to a question, that ‘‘God’s plan’’ for gay people was Hell.
Rugby Australia is understood to be working hard to silence him, and sponsors are threatening to walk. But silencing Folau doesn’t alter this uncomfortable truth, and it serves a greater evil, undermining freedom of speech in a society that regards itself as inclusive.
Inclusive, yes. But only if you agree with a largely unwritten code of behaviour and beliefs.
New Zealand Commonwealth Games gold medal mountain-biker Sam Gaze is another perceived to have broken the code, to have muddied the waters of an acceptable narrative.
He battled hard for that top step on the podium against arch-rival and fellow Kiwi Anton Cooper. It was a reversal of fortune from the race in Glasgow four years earlier.
Two things are clear: Gaze is a fiercely competitive person who was bitterly disappointed to miss that Glasgow gold; and the two athletes, for whatever reason, do not like each other. At all. The winner gave Cooper more than a steely gaze at the end of his hardfought race. Cue another predictable diarrhoea of outrage.
Gaze has since taken to social media to apologise for his actions, but there is a sense that this has been done merely to obscure the more obvious, but inconvenient truth. To create another deemed more acceptable to the public. Or at least, a certain portion.
Which leads us to another uncomfortable truth: Out there in the ether, lurking menacingly in the darker avenues of the cyber highway, is an amorphous huddle of malevolence with one clear objective: a redistribution of opinion, societal values and moral infrastructure along narrower, more idealistic, lines.
It’s not clear how big this group is, or even where they live. But they are potentially more dangerous than sports stars with outdated views or poor discipline.