Letter From Australia:This is a busy time of year in Antipodean sport, with the build-up to football finals coinciding with the onset of the spring racing carnival. But, in terms of news events, it's difficult to remember a busier weekend than the one we've just had.
On Saturday morning, punters awoke to the news the race meetings in Melbourne, Sydney and nearby provincial tracks had been cancelled because of an outbreak of equine flu. At lunchtime on Saturday, it was announced every meeting in Australia had been cancelled except one, the meeting at the Fannie Bay racetrack in Darwin, which was saved by its isolation.
Every horse that ran at Fannie Bay was stabled at the track, meaning those horses had had no chance to come in contact with the highly contagious virus. The 72-hour moratorium on race meetings in the rest of the country is due to expire tomorrow.
The story involves Ireland in that the Coolmore stud has had to lock up eight stallions, including Encosta De Lago and Danehill Dancer. It's also suggested an Irish dressage horse is the likely source of the virus.
The Irish horse was quarantined at Eastern Creek, near Sydney, before being sent to stables in Centennial Park, in the heart of Sydney, where reports on the weekend suggested 200 horses were affected by the flu. An exclusion zone has been set up around Centennial Park and nearby Randwick racecourse; no horses are to be moved in or out.
The news is a big deal to the economy as well as the racing industry. Racing is estimated to be an Aust$8 billion (€12.5 billion) industry in Australia that provides 74,000 jobs in the state of Victoria alone. Jockeys and trainers enjoyed a rare chance to watch their children play soccer on Saturday morning, but most were hoping there would be no such opportunities in coming weeks.
Yesterday evening I was making my way into the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the match between Australian football league clubs Richmond and Essendon when I saw a well-known professional punter, long hair flowing down his back, doing the same. I wondered whether he was at the football simply because there were no race meetings to occupy his mind.
The match at which I saw the punter was the last in Melbourne to feature legendary Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy, who was told recently that after 27 years his contract would not be renewed. It was also the last match in Melbourne for champion Essendon player James Hird, who is retiring after 16 seasons.
There was poignancy in Essendon's opponent yesterday because Sheedy had spent all his playing career at Richmond. As a player, he was renowned for his toughness and canniness, and they're attributes that have served him well as a coach.
Hird, as a player, has been renowned for grace and poise, and especially for his ability to bend a game to his will. It was significant yesterday that whenever he went near the ball the game opened up for him, as if he had arranged the match according to a set of private instructions. Such is the capacity of the great players of any game.
The match itself was a drab old affair, unbefitting the extraordinary crowd of 88,000 that flocked to the Melbourne Cricket Ground to bid farewell to two greats. The sad part was that apart from Hird, who was brilliant, the occasion was too large for the Essendon players, most of whom were unsighted. Richmond, the bottom team in the AFL, careered past their favoured opponents to score a handsome victory.
The evening's real events happened after the final siren when Sheedy and Hird completed slow laps of honour before the madly-clapping thousands. It was an emotional occasion, entirely in keeping with the stature of the two men involved.
As a Richmond fan, I felt quite choked up when Richmond captain Matthew Richardson presented a mounted Tigers jumper to Sheedy, as a show of respect from his original club. It was a gesture that spoke of a largeness of spirit that is not always part of a parochial game.
And the best part of the evening? The fact there was no interview conducted by some inane television type and blasted over the stadium's sound system. The only noise was the cheering of the crowd. Apart from a small burst of the inevitable fireworks (what is it with Australia and fireworks?), there was a marked lack of gimmickry. If only big sporting occasions could always be like this.
When Sheedy and Hird were starting out in football, players finished a match and drank as long and hard as possible before getting a few hours sleep and then doing it again. Such weekend rituals were considered the making of young men.
In this professional age, few players drink. But, according to anecdotal evidence, many of them take designer drugs such as cocaine and ice.
The drug problem at West Coast was exposed before the season. Star midfielder Ben Cousins was subsequently booked into a US rehabilitation clinic and the playing list was put under enormous scrutiny about its nocturnal activities.
On Friday night, a Melbourne television channel ran a report based on confidential information about the drug problem at a Melbourne AFL club. The report was based on medical records that were supposedly found in a gutter outside a rehabilitation clinic before being sold to the television station.
Besides the unlikelihood of these records being anything other than stolen, many were outraged that confidential information had provided the basis for the story. It's as if footballers no longer have any right to a private life.
As distasteful as it might be, increased scrutiny in private lives is the result of celebrity mania throughout the western world and the added money in the game through television deals. The English Premier League provides a neat parallel, if on a larger scale.
Trends on a global scale are responsible for this weekend's drama in racing circles, just as they're responsible for off-field escalations in Australian football. The simple days are gone forever. We've embraced the globalisation of sport; we're in a world of our own making.
