A fallen hero who made fools of his fans
AS A ten year-old in 1988, the bleakest sporting experience I’d known was the double horror two years earlier of Everton surrendering their league title to arch-rivals Liverpool and the subsequent Wembley FA Cup Final defeat to the same opponents. I was prone to melancholy whenever the Toffees lost — which was not too often in those halcyon days. But at least any sport misery I suffered was a result of pure contests played on equal terms. Then, Ben Johnson was sent home from the Seoul Olympics after testing positive for an anabolic steroid, and my eyes were opened to a more sinister element in sport. The Canadian sprinter had been an athletics icon. He had won the ‘blue riband’ event in a time that broke his own world record. Johnson later admitted that triumph in Rome was also drug-assisted. At that age, it was a young sports fanatic’s equivalent of discovering Father Christmas doesn’t exist. The following 24 years have featured extreme sporting highs: Joe Royle’s time in charge at Everton; the resurgence of the England cricket team under Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan; great tennis provided by the current gilded generation of male players, and Europe establishing hegemony over the U.S. in the Ryder Cup — all this before the annus mirabilis of 2012. To appreciate the highs, you must experience the lows — and there have been plenty — but regardless of the hurt inflicted when a favoured team or individual is vanquished, it can’t compare to the empty feeling of being cheated; the miserable revelation that the event that so enraptured you just wasn’t at all real. In 2000, at Centurion in South Africa, we thought Hansie Cronje was engineering a thrilling end to a Test Match with the spirit of cricket uppermost in his mind. In fact, Cronje was in the pay of a bookmaker who demanded a positive outcome to the game against England. Match fixing has since emerged as a real stain on cricket. Without spectators having complete trust in those they’re watching, the contest is unviable. Last week’s exposure of seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong and his U.S. Postal team as having run ‘the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme sport has ever seen’ is the most crushing blow ever delivered to our relationship with any athletic behemoth. Armstrong transcended cycling and became a hero to millions worldwide, me included. I was in awe of this incredible human being who’d recovered from testicular cancer, which spread to his abdomen, lungs and brain, to win the most physically gruelling of sporting endurance events. To learn that those seven summers of wonderment were a fraud was depressing. I felt duped and perhaps a little foolish for having fervently believed the fairy tale. Yes, sport can disappoint or frustrate, but it has no right to leave us feeling cheated in the way Armstrong has.
PAUL McNAMARA, Fareham, Hants.