About once a fortnight, roughly, I receive an invitation to take part in a debate. Sometimes, it is from a student union, sometimes a radio station, sometimes a speaker bureau. The specific issue changes on each occasion, but the thrust is always the same: why is sport going to the dogs?
Here are a few recent examples: has big money ruined the Premier League? Is the scourge of doping going to destroy athletics? Has corruption at Fifa fatally undermined football? Has sport become too professional? Have pushy parents made youth football intolerable?
All are worthy subjects. They all reflect underlying problems in sport, each of which needs to be tackled. Much newspaper coverage is, understandably, devoted to this, too. But I have stopped taking part in such debates because they consistently overlook a deeper truth: namely, that despite all these scourges, sport continues to flourish. Isn’t that a worthy topic of discussion, too?
As of yesterday afternoon, a tweet from Leicester City’s official account saying “Leicester City. Champions of England” had been retweeted almost 400,000 times. The face of Claudio Ranieri didn’t merely adorn the back pages of British newspapers, but also the front page ofLa Gazzetta dello Sport under the headline “King Claudio”. In Leicester, the scenes of jubilation were quite unlike anything you will see in almost any other area of human activity.
This capacity of sport to inspire is not limited to the Midlands in early 21st century; it is part of the human condition. Back in Ancient Greece, where the original Olympic Games took place without interruption for more than a thousand years (the equivalent of the period between the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066 and today), people from across the ancient world pilgrimaged to the ancient sanctuary to watch athletes run, jump and play games.
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When Lucian, the great historian, wrote his ode to the Games, he might have been describing the atmosphere at the King Power stadium on any Saturday afternoon during the course of this remarkable season: “Oh, I can’t describe the scene in mere words. You really should experience first-hand the incredible pleasure of standing in that cheering crowd, admiring the athletes’ courage . . . their amazing physical conditioning, their unbeatable determination, and their unstoppable passion for victory.”
One of the most powerful interviews I have read on these pages was given by Sarah Winckless, a rower, in 2009. She won an Olympic bronze medal in 2004, is a two-time world champion, and has a degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge. She also carries the mutant gene for Huntington’s disease, a progressive neurological condition for which there is no known cure, which was diagnosed when she was in her early twenties. The disease has curtailed her life expectancy.
But did this diagnosis undermine her passion for sport? Did her diminished lifespan mean that she put the frivolity of sport to one side so she could focus on the things that really matter? Quite the reverse. After the diagnosis, she strove to compete in London 2012, and very nearly did so. “I needed something that really scared me to give me that motivation,” she said. “When I race the single I can get so scared that I have to remind myself to breathe and that’s quite exciting.” Today, she is still in thrall to sport. She watches rowing, cycling, hockey, as her Twitter feed reveals (she is also leading a campaign to raise £50,000 to fund two Huntington’s nurses in Scotland).
I am confident that I would be just the same. If I had a quarter, a tenth, of the time left to live, I would watch more sport, not less. I would play more sport, not less. I would write more about sport, not less. We work to live, and that is why work is considered a serious thing. To go to the office, to earn money, is a necessity. But at the weekends, when we can choose what to do, when, with our volitional decisions, we articulate what provides us with meaning, we watch and play sport in our millions.
As George Mallory put it: “What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.” He was talking about climbing mountains, but the same logic applies to climbing the table in the third division of the Reading table tennis league, or climbing to the apex of the Barclays Premier League.
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Football — a sport supposedly going to the dogs — has stadiums up and down the country, from the parks of Villa and St James’ to Old Trafford and White Hart Lane, full to capacity with the throb of humanity. On fields and greens, from Cornwall to Scotland, you can see children kicking balls, jumpers for goalposts. At St John’s Wood, you can see cricket enthusiasts on the day of a Test match snaking down the Wellington Road. At Wimbledon, many of us have queued for half a day to glimpse Roger Federer or Rafa Nadal hitting a tennis ball.
This is how people choose to spend their precious time. It is why Plato, Cicero and Herodotus travelled every four years to Olympia. To quote L S Lowry, the English artist, they were “going to the match”. For all of the snobbishness about sport, particularly from those who have never taken the trouble to understand it, this is what many work from Monday to Friday in order to experience. This is why we can say that sport, this trivial pursuit, has a seriousness all its own. It provides joy.
And that is the deepest lesson that many of us will take away from Leicester’s victory this season. The drama of an underdog victory that nobody saw coming, even as it materialised before our eyes. The spectacle of a bunch of disparate men, who had been written off at previous clubs, morphing into that most improbable of things: a cohesive team. As the pressure mounted, and many doubted their capacity to hold on, they crystallised into an almost unstoppable force.
But even now, the story of the past nine months, which has been told and retold in the hours since Mark Clattenburg blew his whistle in the game between Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, has not ended. There is the question of: what next? Can Leicester build on their triumph? Can they defy the odds for a second season? Or will they implode, the weight of expectation finally telling?
We can be sure that Ranieri, described rather wonderfully on these pages as “the Italian uncle we all wish we had”, will be turning his attention to this very question. We can be sure, too, that this astonishing group of players will be looking to “kick on”. Other, richer clubs will be eyeing transfer signings; Pep Guardiola, about to arrive on these shores, will be pondering tactical strategies to thwart Leicester; Spurs, having come so close to the limelight, will be wondering whether their bright, young manager can dare the club to reach still higher.
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The narrative of sport never stops. The legends of previous seasons, previous triumphs, add context and fabric to the storylines of today. The ’66 World Cup, The Lisbon Lions, the Busby Babes, The Rumble in the Jungle, Botham’s Ashes, United’s Treble, the Miracle of Istanbul, London 2012, and so it goes on. Even as we revel in the heroics of Leicester, the triumph to end all triumphs, we look forward to the next chapter in this incredible tale called sport.
