Rio wasteland proves developing world should run a mile from IOC
he official document on Olympic legacy runs to 39 pages. As the International Olympic Committee sees it, any Games must bequeath to its host city a sparkling smorgasbord of social, sporting, environmental, urban and economic enrichment.
If so, on how many of these fronts have the people of Rio de Janeiro been served? Even by the tumbleweed standards of most post-Olympic comedowns, the images of desolation in Rio are shocking.
Just six months on, the main cluster of venues in Barra represents a fraying, decaying wasteland. The local Cariocas, sold on the usual spiel that the Games would bring a spike in living standards, survey a scene of bleak futility.
It is pitiful that the IOC persists in this vain posturing as revolutionary for the developing world, when it represents nothing more than an alien spaceship passing through.
In future, if cities such as Rio decide they cannot afford the ludicrous demands made of them, they should run a mile from the whole shebang. Years of bankruptcy hardly constitute a fair exchange for a two-week party. Tommy Lawton was another whose life unravelled once his involvement in football ceased. A consummate centre-forward in his Thirties prime for Everton, he was reduced in later years to begging Richard Attenborough, with whom he had grown close at Chelsea, for money and a job. “Please, Dickie,” the abject missive said. “Please help me.” His passing in 1996, in a Nottingham care home, was a lonely one. In the words of Dawn Astle, daughter of Lawton protégé and West Bromwich Albion striker Jeff: “Sadly, Tommy Lawton died of dementia.”
A key detail about Lawton, which can no longer be passed off as coincidence, is that he was also a prolific header of the ball. To him, headers were a masochistic pleasure, and he would practise with medicine balls to achieve a more juddering impact. It would help, he believed, toughen him up.
Lawton, when Notts County manager, imparted the same love of the discipline to Astle, who had joined as an apprentice in 1957.
Having shown an exceptional talent for heading, Astle died in 2002, aged 59, again from dementia. The pathologist who examined his brain found that it resembled that of a boxer. A coroner agreed that the probable cause of death was “industrial disease” – namely, the cumulative ravages of thousands of headers.
We know from neurologists that the brain can rock backwards and forwards inside the skull with each collision of head and leather. We know, too, that the percentage of former players who have developed dementia is far higher than it would be without sustained exposure to cranial injury. As Willie Stewart, a consultant neuropathologist, told Stiles’s son, Jon, the average rate of dementia is one in 44 – equal to two football squads – and not, as with the team of ’66, four in 11.
The problem is fathoming what football does about this nightmare in its midst. Anybody who has watched the film
will be aware of two central points. One is that the burden of proof of a causal link between gridiron and CTE has become incontrovertible. The other is that the National Football League is far too powerful to be persuaded easily of the case for change. As Dr Bennet Omalu is informed: “The NFL own an entire day of the week.”
Well, football in this country owns just about every day of the week. It is not about to issue an overnight edict to ban headers based on the literature in an academic journal. But the sport can be assured that this growing crisis is unlikely to recede.
Headers are dangerous, and footballers are a long time retired. Football will soon face a legal imperative, if not a moral obligation, to look at the broken men and broken minds that it has left behind, and to ask whether the ends justify the means.