New Covid panic may sound death knell for some sports

Threat of shutdowns leaves governing bodies asking how they can even survive in months ahead

There is an inescapable sense this week of a dam wall being breached. As if it were not galling enough to listen to Prof Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance, 2020’s twin emissaries of doom, softening up the nation for another six months of mayhem, sport is reaching for the types of solemn warnings not heard since March. With Leyton Orient’s Carabao Cup game against Tottenham tonight in doubt after a cluster of Covid positives among their players, the Manchester Marathon, already cancelled this year, has just had its planned 2021 return pushed back from April to October.

It is this bleak language of cancellation and postponement that sport hoped to have left behind. Back in early spring, as a virus of unknown lethality girdled the globe, the fate of a competition on any scale was to be scrapped. The Olympic Games? Unthinkable. A rallying event in Cornwall still several months away? Abandoned. And yet, by degrees, major sports have shown the ingenuity to pick their way through the wreckage.

Even in an age when international travel is at the mercy of Thursday night tweets by Transport Minister Grant Shapps, Tottenham are this week scheduled to complete a doubleheader of Europa League trips to Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Inside a suffocating straitjacket of restrictions, sports have somehow found some room to breathe. But sure enough, just as the Premier League embarks on an eight-month tightrope walk of a season, and just as an army of amateur joggers starved of social outlet dare to contemplate the return of Parkrun, along comes the Government to erect more bollards along the way. Gyms and leisure centres, despite being left on their knees by a four-month shutdown, and having so far recorded minimal prevalence of Covid on their premises, are forced to beg the Prime Minister not to mothball them again.

The danger, we are led to believe, is that if the virus is left to burn along its present trajectory, the UK will be in France’s situation in just a fortnight’s time. For sport’s purposes, it is worth examining this French example a little more

closely. On the one hand, cases across the Channel are running higher, with 5,298 cases yesterday to the UK’S 4,368. But on the other, with hospitalisations and deaths far lower than at the April peak, there has been nothing like the same hysterical rush to ban everything that moves.

Against all odds, the country has just staged an extraordinarily successful Tour de France. Despite the logistical nightmare of the peloton, a potential mass biohazard, weaving across myriad departments, it pulled into Paris unscathed. Granted, the scenes for Tadej Pogacar’s coronation on La Planche des Belles Filles were a touch overly exuberant for the halfway point of a pandemic, but the triumph was that the event finished at all.

Elsewhere in France, the path towards some restoration of normality continues unabated, with 5,000 fans allowed in for Paris St-germain’s most recent home game and the same number on Court Philippe-chatrier when the French Open makes its belated entrance next week.

Here, it is beyond the wit of the Government to accommodate more than a fifth of that total inside a vast football stadium. “Pilot events” come and go, the goalposts shifting as abruptly and incomprehensibly as all the other infernal, flavour-ofthe-month edicts that strangle normal life.

France, having implemented a lockdown so severe that citizens could not even visit the supermarket without printing out a form, appears determined never to go there again. The UK, having taken a more moderate approach for the first wave, is now in a state of suspended animation for the second, politicians urging the population to “get back to the things you love” – of which sport is a primary element – only to wrest such liberties away once the panic sets in.

To think, there is a blithe expectation that sports can afford to be strung along like this for six months more. Some will be fortunate to last six weeks. As a plethora of governing bodies cautioned last night, harsher rules portend not merely a bump in the road, but economic carnage that could drive their sports into ruin.

It is high time the Government understood that by letting sport down so grievously, it is tearing a vital piece of the social fabric apart.

Harsher rules portend not merely a bump in the road, but economic carnage for some sports