Winds of change blowing in sport — and about time too
It has been an interesting few days. The Indian Premier League (IPL) has been accused of treating players like cattle and Formula One (F1) is going to stop treating women like cattle.
Vladimir Putin, who took a dip in icy water last week to celebrate the Epiphany, earlier this week apologised to the Russians heading to the Winter Olympics for not protecting them during the doping scandal. Not a day later, 28 Russian athletes had their lifetime bans lifted. A coincidence, surely.
On Thursday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned doping bans for the 28 ahead of the Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, ruling that there was insufficient evidence that they had broken anti-doping rules at the 2014 Games.
While there were no reports on how Putin’s manly bits reacted to the cold water (they probably got bigger), you can be sure there will be a lot of shrivelling going on in the hiding place of Grigory Rodchenkov. The former head of the Moscow anti-doping lab testified that he had given Russian athletes cocktails of performance-enhancing drugs and also swapped any possible dirty samples for clean ones.
“We know how difficult it is to achieve victory in sport,” Putin told the Russians who would be competing in the Games under a neutral flag.
“It is twice as difficult when sport is mixed with certain events and phenomena that are unfamiliar. Forgive us for not being unable to protect you from this. But you and all lovers of sport should have no doubt that Russia has supported and supports the idea of clean sport,” he was quoted by the state news agency RIA Novosti.
No matter that the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC’s) decision was taken on thousands of documents that backed up Rodchenkov, other whistleblowers and a “secret” database of the Moscow lab.
The CAS “unanimously found that the evidence put forward by the IOC in relation to this matter did not have the same weight in each individual case”. Russian Olympic Committee president Alexander Zhukov reckoned the decision was “fair”. Well, he would.
Tony Irish, the executive chairman of the Federation of International Cricketers Associations (Fica), believed the IPL auction was not entirely fair, or, to use his careful phrasing, “ideal”.
Heath Mills, CE of the New Zealand players’ association, did not hold back, telling the New Zealand Herald: “I think the whole system is archaic and deeply humiliating for the players, who are paraded like cattle for all the world to see.”
The contracts are a large part of the issue, with teams allowed to extend or terminate them at will. Some players do well out of the IPL, others do not. None of them – well, except for MS (Dhoni) and Virat (Kohli) – get to choose where they would like to play. It is a debate that will rumble on and nothing will change.
There will be welcome change in F1 as they plan to do away with the medieval practice of “grid girls” this season. The reasoning is simple: it is degrading.
Sean Bratches, an MD at commercial operations at Formula One, put it thus: “While the practice of employing grid girls has been a staple of F1 grands prix for decades, we feel this custom does not resonate with our brand values and clearly is at odds with modernday societal norms.
“We don’t believe the practice is appropriate or relevant to F1 and its fans, old and new, across the world.”
Appropriate and relevant. What role do “grid girls” play in F1? Purely to do to man (and women) bits what ice baths cannot do to Putin the Incredible. They are titillation, prizes for men of the sport, a bit of fluff, an image of how men want women to look and dress.
Kelly Brook, the model and actress who was once a “grid girl”, made the point against the practice by trying to support it: “We are no longer seen as eye candy but are instead representing the sport.”
Yes, but as The Times put it best, if they weren’t eye candy, then why aren’t they short, fat or just plain ordinary?
It is a tradition that grates, and one that should have had cold water poured on it a long time ago.