A summer of sporting glory offers escape from society
From the Lions to the Tour and now the Open, this season of compelling spectacles should be cherished for providing respite from the anger and confusion elsewhere
The expensively reared among you will know the social ‘season’ in sport encompasses the Boat Race, Henley, polo, Wimbledon, Cowes, ‘the Lord’s Test match’ and £50million football transfers.
Not really. The last of those is merely the ‘ker-ching’ soundtrack that now accompanies the sporting summer: once a fixture of the London social calendar, now a colossal, rolling entertainment industry that keeps us distracted from political mayhem.
On the global agency wires today, bulletins with London, Southport and Nottingham datelines dominate the sports news. The Wimbledon sweep-up, Open Championship previews and second England-south Africa Test inquests fill the screen. On Sunday alone, it was possible in Britain to watch Roger Federer win his eighth Wimbledon men’s singles title, Lewis Hamilton take the British Grand Prix, Chris Froome retain the Tour de France’s yellow jersey (from across the Channel, admittedly), a Trent Bridge Test, the women’s cricket World Cup and World Para Athletics Championships.
No other country can match this menu of sporting opiates, because none tries to play, or stage, such an array of games and pastimes. The ‘social season’ – once a deadly serious list of places at which to be seen – now blinks out from an astonishing prospectus of primetime British fixtures, which we often take for granted.
Observing this feast at the weekend, I began recounting the dramas so far, either live or on the smart TVS that render remote events so vivid in the home: a Champions League final in Cardiff between Real Madrid and Juventus, a Champions Trophy final in cricket between India and Pakistan at the Oval, Joe Root’s first-innings 190 on his debut as England Test captain at Lord’s; and, best of all, the British and Irish Lions drawing a Test series in New Zealand, with 8.35am Saturday kick-offs back home – about the best breakfast spectacle a sportloving family could have.
So what next? How about we get Dustin Johnson, Jordan Spieth, Rory Mcilroy, Justin Rose, Jon Rahm and the Masters champion, Sergio Garcia, up to Royal Birkdale to shove aside the Liverpool footballing greats who pass their time playing golf in the Southport area? Then add Tommy Fleetwood, a local lad who says he dreamt of playing in a Birkdale Open from the age of five.
While this four-day theatre assembles itself, a women’s football European Championship is under way. Up ahead are Glorious Goodwood and Usain Bolt’s last race, in the World Athletics Championship at the London Stadium, the 2012 Olympic stage. In the 100m on the night of August 5, it falls to London and Britain to send Bolt into retirement: a moment of simultaneous deification and loss. Still to come – the return of the Premier League, where everyone now seems to cost £50million and a cup of coffee trebles in price while you are drinking it.
Gorged on all this, the modern mind can easily slip into complacency, or a sense of entitlement. The action flies by, with no time to stop and savour.
So much of British life frustrates and confounds. A Southern Rail commuter, for example, could endure a joke of a journey to and from work, and come home to hear bad news about the state school their children attend, or the hospital a member of their family was admitted to. The backdrop of anxiety and uncertainty is unmistakable. Only a sophist would pretend otherwise. An opinion poll on staying in the European Union has unleashed ferocious consequences, arguably the least important of which has been raising the cost of holidays – perhaps to watch the Lions or the Tour de France.
A glut of sport will not make any of this go away. It will not settle the Brexit terms, save the NHS or rescue us from charlatan train companies.
Only the very wealthy could lose themselves in endlessly attending these events. And some are corrupted, to a large degree, by drugs, greed, institutional neglect and financial skulduggery. There is bullying and sexual abuse. Nobody could sensibly frame sport as a utopia in which to escape the anger and confusion of British society.
But at least it presents constant elements at a time when the future feels like a blur, and the present feels physically unsafe. Many of these events belong to all of us, notionally. Wimbledon fortnight, though narrow in social scope, is received as a national event. Nobody can privatise Andy Murray or Jo Konta. The Open, too, has the feel of public property, even after its migration to Sky. In a world of scrambled certainties, there is reassurance to be felt from the human spectacle of performers trying to be good, or better: the countless acts of attempted self-transcendence that make up a competition.
Or maybe sport is just a good duvet to pull over our heads – a good place to hide from reality. Most of us would rather have stability, the rule of law, fairness, good public services. But to think of this great summer of sport as mere mental bubblegum is to downplay it unnecessarily. It is one thing we can look at together, with shared understandings, in search of moments of inspiration.
Traditionally, the season ends with the Glorious Twelfth of August, when the shooting season starts. This just happens to be when football’s Premier League returns; when the other sports run for cover.