The trouble with the truth
convictions that don’t necessarily conform to the more progressive, enlightened view of their peers; and sport is populated by fiercely competitive people, some of whom don’t particularly 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.
Australian rugby star Israel Folau is a deeply religious person who doesn’t care much for homosexuality. He tweeted, in response to a question, that God’s plan for gay people was hell.
It’s not the first time Folau has got into trouble for expressing his religious views. Most will not agree; many have gone on to social media to register their outrage. Rugby Australia is understood to be working hard to silence him, and sponsors are threatening to walk.
But silencing Folau doesn’t alter this particular uncomfortable truth, and it serves a greater evil, undermining freedom of speech in a society that regards itself as sophisticated, mature and 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. 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 fiercely competitive and was bitterly disappointed to miss that Glasgow gold; and the pair, for whatever reason, do not like each other. At all.
That happens. Even when athletes are wearing the same colours of club and/or country. The winner gave Cooper more than a steely gaze at the end of his hard-fought race. Cue more predictable outrage.
Gaze has since taken to social media to apologise, but there is a sense this was done merely to obscure the more obvious, inconvenient truth. To create another deemed more acceptable to a portion of the public.
Which leads us to another uncomfortable truth: Out there in the darker avenues and on-ramps of the cyber highway is an amorphous huddle of malevolence, with the objective of a redistribution of opinion, societal values and moral infrastructure along narrower, more idealistic, lines.