Power brokers immune to pleasure and pain
COMMENT
LOOK at the monstrous regiment of horrible old men who run sport, the great grumpocracy that shapes our sporting world, and you can’t help but wonder: Where did it all go wrong? What happened to those fine young men who loved sport so much? How did they lose the sport within themselves?
Surely they all loved playing and winning and losing. Surely they felt the joy of body and mind working together in that sweet way. Surely they felt the love of their team-mates in victory, surely they felt the secret triumph of doing it all alone.
Surely they savoured the heavy-limbed exhaustion when they lay in bed afterwards, surely they felt that perverse pride in their own hurts, surely they felt the warm glow of success, or the stupid desire to cry when they had lost.
What persuaded them, when at last they reluctantly clambered into their suits forever, that sport wasn’t really about honour and glory and failure and triumph and spilling your guts and weeping and piling up a collection of memories that would never grow dull? What told them that sport was really about money, and that money was really about power?
I first found this failure to understand sport in people like Juan Antonio Samaranch, former president of the International Olympic Committee, and Joao Havelange, former president of football’s Fifa.
It can be found now in Sepp Blatter at Fifa and Michel Platini at Uefa, the European Union of Football Associations. Put such
One of the greatest episodes of cheating in the history of sport happened on their watch. There was no evidence against either man and both deny they were complicit. people in charge of football and you’re always going to end up with the World Cup in Qatar. I’d be inclined to let off Jacques Rogge, president of the IOC, if he hadn’t let golf, of all things, into the Olympics.
But the finest examples of horrible old men still in office come inevitably from the International Cycling Union, the UCI. If there is a serious rift between a sporting body and Wada, the World Anti-Doping Agency, then it is prima-facie evidence that something has gone pretty badly wrong with the sport. Wada has accused the UCI of being deceitful and arrogant; surely that alone is enough to make the position of the top men untenable.
The men in question are the president, Pat McQuaid, and former president, Hein Verbruggen. One of the greatest episodes of cheating in the history of sport – there was no evidence against either man and both deny they were complicit – happened on their watch. Lance Armstrong has confessed he won the Tour de France seven times while using illegal drugs. During this time he actually paid money to the UCI.
If such a thing happens while you are in charge, you have to go. If you are guilty of complicity in this, you have to go; if you are innocent, you are so totally and completely incompetent that you still have to go.
What cycling needs is a new start. What all those who love the sport need is to see the bad past condemned. What the sport needs is new people in charge. If McQuaid and Verbruggen (a) loved their sport and (b) had its best interests at heart, they would have left quite a long time ago.
They would have done so expressing their horror at what had happened and their shame in the part they played, leaving cycling to relaunch itself as a younger, cleaner and more attractive thing; one in which the values of sport mattered more than anything else.
But no. With epic predictability, they are grubbily and jealously holding on to power. The things that bring us joy in sport no longer affect them and nor, it seems, do the things in sport that bring us pain. For such people sport is only a medium for power.
Sport is a celebration of youth, but it is cursed to be run by horrible old men; men who have lost the sport inside.