A sporting year to stir the dispassionate

I've always had a certain sympathy for people whose passions are never roused by sport, no matter how stirring the event or extraordinary the achievement. I'm quite sure they don't want sympathy and probably regard themselves as the perfectly sane, mature and well balanced ones, believing the rest of us to be lacking in some way. And maybe they're right, but still, how do they fill that void in their lives? Like that forty-something-year-old man in the green fleece jacket with the sandy moustache and balding head sitting in the arrivals area of Dublin airport on a Sunday afternoon back in October.

When I came through the arrivals gate he was sitting alone reading a novel, surrounded by hastily abandoned luggage, looking up occasionally to frown at the shrieks and gasps and roars coming from the throngs gathered around the big screen in the corner. I battled my way through the crowd to discover the source of their frenzy - a rugby match. Hmm. For a minute I was on the side of the man in the green fleece jacket and just reckoned the crowd around me needed to get out more. Up until then I had yawned my way through the rugby World Cup but the match on the screen was no ordinary match, it was France v New Zealand in the semi-final of the competition and it very definitely fell in to the goosebumps-inducing category of great sporting spectacles of our time. I don't know what it is about sharing these momentous occasions with complete strangers but at their conclusion there always seems to follow a mass exchange of hugs and telephone numbers. Oprah would probably say it's because you've shared a beautiful moment together, the exhilaration you felt helping unchain your previously shackled emotions and thus allowing you to reveal your true self and, therefore, creating a bond with this complete stranger that will last forever. Or even longer. I'm not so sure, Oprah talks an awful lot of tosh, but she could be right on this one.

Anyway, just as Philippe Bernat-Salle was heading for the try line to seal France's glorious victory that man in the green fleece jacket was heading for the exit, his loved one having arrived, oblivious to the wonderfulness of it all. No hugs or telephone numbers for him, his loss. And he probably wasn't watching his telly back in July either when Jean Van de Velde stood barefoot in a stream at the final hole of the British Open, trying to figure out how he'd got there in the first place. Like his rugby playing compatriots Van de Velde seemed unfamiliar with sporting scripts, only his ad-libbing gave him a place in the teardrop-inducing category of great sporting spectacles of our time. Ever wonder how mere mortals like ourselves would handle the mental pressure - assuming we were blessed with the talent for a day - of being within touching distance of a great sporting prize? Well, at that moment in Carnoustie, Van de Velde, a mere mortal on that final hole, appeared to provide the answer - not very well. Until last weekend it could have been classed as the most painful sporting moment of 1999, but nothing hurt as much as the sight of a frail and ailing Muhammad Ali accepting his sports star of the Millennium award on the BBC. There was plenty of depressing ugliness in the sporting year too. Like the crowd at Silverstone cheering when Michael Schumacher's car ploughed in to a wall at ferocious speed at the British Grand Prix in July, or football crowds in England singing about their wish for David Beckham's baby to die, in the hope that they'd put his father off his game.

And was Lance Armstrong's Tour de France victory one of the truly heroic sporting achievements of our time, in light of his recent battle with cancer, or was it another great con? How can we be sure anymore than seeing is believing on the sporting field? If records tumble at the Sydney Olympics next year do we just throw our eyes to heaven and switch off our televisions, or do we marvel at the brilliance of the record-breakers? It's up to the sporting authorities to restore our faith by getting a bit more serious about drug-testing. But it was a great sporting year too. The hurling championship was magnificent, with so many epic matches it was hard to keep count. Clare against Galway in the All-Ireland quarter-finals, for example, will live long in the memory. For 89 minutes the European Cup final between Manchester United and Bayern Munich was as poor a footballing spectacle as the competition had produced all season but then . . . well . . . for fear of upsetting a sizeable chunk of the population we'll leave it at that. And back in March Brian Lara produced as fine a display of batting as most seasoned cricket watchers have ever seen, scoring a double century against Australia in Jamaica, just when even his own people were beginning to write him off. As Oprah might put it, it was `awesome'.

So, that forty-something-year-old man in the green fleece jacket with the sandy moustache and balding head who didn't appear to like sport doesn't know what he missed in 1999. Hope the novel was good.