Ain’t it rum? Last week sport was morally bankrupt, finished, no longer worthy of taking up an intelligent person’s time for a single minute. This week it’s shining out as one of the glories of the human spirit. And yet sport can cope with the contradiction quite effortlessly.
It’s hard to know the worst thing in athletics right now, but it’s either the fact that Russia has been implicated in a state-run doping programme or the possibility that the former president of the sport’s world governing body is accused of taking bribes to cover it up. In football the acronym of Fifa, football’s world governing body, means corruption: nothing more, nothing less. In Southwark the Chris Cairns trial continues, with nine witnesses suggesting that Cairns is guilty of fixing high-level cricket matches.
So if we listened to all the commentators last week, we should all have seen through sport by now. We should have recognised its futility and walked away from it for ever. But somehow we didn’t. The damn stuff is still going on all over the place.
This week England played France in a football match at Wembley. You can call it a glorious assertion of the spirit of humanity, or a glorious up-yours to all the terrorists in all the world. Either way you would be right.
Five days earlier, France played Germany in Paris, and the match was one of the targets in the city-wide series of terrorist attacks. Three people were killed and others were injured near the stadium. It all seemed a bit personal to me: I seem to have spent half my life covering matches at the Stade de France and I could find my way there from St Pancras blindfold.
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