An Irishman's Diary

Concerned reader George Colton writes to me about a recent report on the sports pages to the effect that Danish cyclist Michael Rasmussen tested "non-negative" for drugs during the Tour de France. George's question is a reasonable one: "Was he pro-positive, or not?" I only wish I could answer that with a simple pro-yes or non-no, but as always in these cases there are lawyers involved.

It appears that the French anti-doping people were prevented from declaring the result of his urine test "positive" for legal reasons (because of the criteria for positivity used by the World Anti-Doping Agency). In an ideal world, they would have been prevented from declaring it "non-negative" too, for grammatical reasons. Sadly, it is lawyers who have inherited the earth, not English teachers.

You may recall that Rasmussen was leading this year's Tour with four days to go, when he was sensationally sacked by the Rabobank team for lying about his whereabouts in pre-race training. He had been in Italy, but was claiming to be in Mexico until a TV commentator bumped into him in the Dolomites (always a painful thing) and blew the whistle. He had missed a series of drug tests in the past year.

His position now echoes the plight of Schrodinger's Cat in the famous "thought experiment" based on quantum mechanics. The cat was deemed to be in a "superposition" of possible states - both alive and dead, simultaneously - until his box was opened. Only when observed did it become one or the other.

Rasmussen too was in a superposition of possible states - Italy and Mexico, in this case - until the TV commentator let the cat out of the box. The urine test added to the case against him. Unfortunately, bicycle mechanics are even more complicated than quantum ones; so, as we have seen, the ambiguity didn't end there.

Lawyers may argue that, much as we might dislike it, "non-negative" is a non-illegitimate mathematical term that covers all numbers from zero upwards. Used here, it enables the French anti-doping people to hint at a range of possible verdicts about the cyclist's sample - from "inconclusive" to "dodgier than a four-euro note".

But there's more. I notice that yesterday's report of the independent inquiry into Rasmussen's sacking criticised the International Cycling Union for acting with "insufficient unambiguousness". This sort of thing really has to stop.

For true football fans everywhere, Manchester United's refusal to play Everton on the night before Christmas must be welcomed as an extremely non-negative development.

The request had been made by Setanta Sports, which hoped to televise the match live at 8pm on Christmas Eve. Everton might well have been tempted, on the grounds that the potential involvement of Santa Claus could have improved their otherwise slim chances of getting a penalty at Old Trafford. But United manager Alex Ferguson quickly scuppered the proposal, saying that his players would want to be at home with their families that night.

It is heart-warming to know that there are still some limits to what sport will do to facilitate television, even if the refusal was a long time coming. More than 30 years, in fact. Because the death of Norman Mailer at the weekend reminds me of one of the earliest and most infamous pieces of TV-enforced sports scheduling: the 1974 "Rumble in the Jungle" between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

The fight was held in Zaire, because only a corrupt African dictator - President Mobutu - would put up the $10 million purse promised by Don King, then just starting out on his career as promoter and chancer extraordinaire. The slight snag in the arrangement was that, to suit closed-circuit TV coverage in the US, the event had to happen at 4am local time.

It was originally planned for late September, already dangerously close to the rainy season. But, as Mailer reminds us in his fascinating (if wildly egocentric) book The Fight, there was an added complication. A week before the appointed day, Foreman was cut in training. The rumble had to be postponed for a month, with Mobutu ordering that the fighters remain in Zaire in the meantime, lest they go home and not come back.

The rains were delayed too, and were well overdue by October 30th when the fight finally took place - confusingly - in the Twentieth of May football stadium. There, Foreman met his nemesis. And the meddling TV schedulers came tantalisingly close to meeting theirs too.

Hours after the fight ended, Mailer wrote, "the rainy season broke and the stars of the African heaven came down". Not since he was a US soldier in the Philippines, 30 years before, had he seen such a deluge. And the effect on the stadium was dramatic: "Foreman's dressing room was a dark pool with old towels floating in a foot of water. . .Orange peels and fight tickets drifted into collection beneath the canvas, and batteries were drenched, generators gave out. Half the Telex machines broke down in the storm, and the satellite ceased to send a picture or a word."

As Mailer added, it would have been a "debacle" if the storm had broken during the fight. It the event, he wrote, it only added to the legend: "Ali would laugh next day and offer to take credit for holding back the rain."

fmcnally@irish-times.ie