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NIALL KIELYperuses the week in sport

Semenya picks the perfect spot for return to action  

IT WAS interesting to note where Caster Semenya chose to run her comeback races after almost a year in athletics purdah, courtesy of the messers who purport to run track and field sports, not least the buffoons in her native South Africa.

Rumour and innuendo continue to dog the teenager, as do bush whispers that suggest she has undergone some sort of “treatment” for an unspecified intersex condition.

Ham-fisted handling by the IAAF and the RSA athletics people led to her being suspended after winning the World Championship 800 metres title in Berlin last August in what was the fastest time in the world that year.

She’s had a tough year since, and it must have been an enormous relief to turn up this month in Lappeenranta, a town in south-eastern Finland, near the Russian border.

The Finns, you see, and their Norwegian neighbours, take their athletics very seriously indeed, and Semanya’s handlers knew their girl would be treated sympathetically and humanely as an athlete, and not as some chromosomal freakshow.

And that’s just how it turned out.

In fact, nothing will tell you more about how knowledgeable the northern Scandinavians are about their athletics than the fact the national hero in Norway is one Andreas Thorkildsen, who was surely born to become a javelin thrower given his family lineage – his father Tomm having thrown further than 70 metres.

He is the first man to hold the World, European and Olympic javelin titles at the one time, and his duels with Finland’s former world champion Tero Pitkamaki are becoming the stuff of Scandi legend.

It is usual for the javelin to be the final event at athletics championships, for reasons that have everything to with the safety of non-throwers, and it is commonplace for knowledgeable and adoring Scandinavian spectators to remain in a stadium en masse until the javelin contest ends.

Another instance: last year, the Finns staged a javelin-only meet that drew nearly 750,000 TV viewers on a Saturday afternoon.

PS Three years ago, Pitkamaki had 15 minutes of very unwanted fame when his javelin accidentally speared French longjumper Salim Sdiri in Rome; but the latter subsequently recovered.

Framed by the devil in the detail

ONE REASSURINGLY striking and common characteristic of the many tributes to and assessments of Alexander Gordon Higgins this past week was the absence of flummery or equivocation. There was no need for the obituarist’s euphemisms or litotes; there was little or none of the crafted coding through which the author artfully lets the informed reader “in on” the subject’s real characteristics.

You’ll have seen it if you’re an obituary junkie. “He did not suffer fools gladly”, for instance, usually translates as: “The dead man was an arrogant/overbearing/ impatient/insufferable (delete to taste) piece of human excrement, lacking any empathy whatever for other human beings.”

No, the creature known for years as Alex “Bomb Scare” Higgins – not for his Belfast links, rather for his capacity to clear a bar in seconds — was such an appalling, selfish, self-centered and uncaring-of-others monster that any attempt to cosmeticise his legacy would’ve been so futile as to deter even the most mealy-mouthed or charitable of essayists.

From the headbutting of a referee, through the threat to have Dennis Taylor shot, via two marriages and countless fights the skinny runt was always destined to lose, his 61 drink-soaked years of reckless life were chaotic and must often have been deeply unhappy. And the end, after more than a decade of smoker’s cancer, must surely have been a release from a purgatory of bone-deep loneliness.

The journey that began in a Sandy Row council house, near which he played his early snooker in the Jam Pot, came full circle with his death in a sheltered housing unit on Donegall Road. From there, in recent years, he ventured forth in search of company, almost always in bars he could reach on foot.

I was minding my own business late last year in Kelly’s Cellars, surrounded, as is my wont, by piles of newspapers and protected (I fondly imagined) by a well-rehearsed rebarbative shoulder (learned at the feet of that master of the saloon-bar silent force field, one David Hanly). Then in comes this etiolated mutation of the snooker player who once introduced himself to Stephen Hendry before a match with the words: “Hello. I’m the Devil.” Lucifer had become an emaciated meerkat.

His clothes were careworn and draped on skeletal thinness, but the hat was newish, set at a jaunty angle. When his Guinness arrived, he invaded my patch and, unattracted by whatever whispered conversation he might start, I moved. My new neighbours were baffled by my indifference: I suspected he wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of cadging pints that evening. The affection for him was palpable.

But perhaps that well ran dry. In recent months I heard he’d been hustling tourists in the Crown Bar in pursuit of booze. Such a sad valedictory to a life that, however demonically lived, embodied at the snooker table epiphanies of purest genius at play. When blessed by the angels of the baize, his high-stance, twitching and swerving symbiosis with snooker took the game to levels of free-form poetry that the prose-grinders – Thorburns, Davises, Reardons, Hendrys – wished they could but touch.

Muralitharan more than a record breaker

SO, FAREWELL then, Muttiah Muralitharan.

What an extraordinary man, and what a record. No, not the precisely 800 Test wickets. Not even the 67 five-ers in the five-day game. Two other aspects of his behaviour merit exegesis: his remarkable stamina, even in the crucible temperatures of arenas that’d give most people dehydration just surviving in the stand; and his cheerful, dignified demeanour through a career during which he was vilified and smeared as a chucker.

I was impressed by the graceful verdicts of former England captains Michael Atherton and Mike Brearley last week, both of whom hailed Murali’s revolutionary contribution to the spin-bowler’s art, and neither of whom evaded the question of the bowling action (whether he bent-elbow threw, rather than straight-arm bowled the ball) of a man who had an inherited bent elbow.

“Even if you think he is a chucker, you must admit he has been a bloody great chucker,” Atherton (who clearly believes no such thing) wrote in The Times.

“Technology has shown that he can spin the ball both ways with his arm in a splint,” Brearley stated in the Observer. “In other words, even though he starts with a bent arm he does not need to straighten it at the elbow in order to bowl. His wrist has a congenital “turn” to it, and much of his spin comes from this unusual anatomy and physiology.”

The investigations of Murali’s actions, using super slow-mo cameras, that splint or cast, making practical the expert theorising on the angle between the longitudinal axis of the upper arm and forearm in the sagittal plane, effectively cleared the Sri Lankan to bowl on (more power to his elbow).

But there has been much more to this man than mere cricket. He is also a one-man lifter of national morale in his country, and his quiet and persistent involvement with charitable, educational and training initiatives in Sri Lanka has been immense.

On top of all that, he has always been cheerful, affable, talkative, modest and a bottomless resource of advice for young spinners.

Ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann.

We'll have a ball of a time watching Jabulani effect

IT’LL BE interesting to see how many complaints emerge this winter about Adidas’s Jabulani soccer ball. It drew opprobrium in South Africa from the vacuous commentariat, and from valetudinarian guardians of the onion-bag.

More commonsense comments ranged from the optimistic David James (“It’s horrible, but it’s horrible for everyone.“) to the obvious from Alvaro Arbeloa: “It’s round, like always.”

Given that pros in the German, Austrian, USA, Portuguese and Swiss leagues used the ball all last season without getting over-excited, reaction to difficulties in controlling the ball in South Africa smacked somewhat of the theatrical.

Here’s a topical thought, which I’d otherwise hold for the first Friday of next April: could the problems be down to the Coriolis effect? As physicists know, this force acts on a mass moving in a rotating system and works perpendicular to the direction of motion, and to the axis of rotation; thus deflecting moving objects to the right in the Northern Hemisphere, and left in the South. Travellers see it most obviously when they see liquid exiting a sink spin counter-clockwise in the North, but clockwise through Southern Hemisphere plugholes.

Which leaves Fifa two solutions: hold future World Cups smack on the equator; or break the Law of Adidas Pelf.

Model behaviour at the 2010 World Cup

AND FINALLY . . . on mature reflection, most of the football played in South Africa varied from wily to woeful, lullaby soccer, with scarcely a memorable game to leaven our sensibilities.

And thus my absolutely favourite quote from the soccerfest is WAG-sourced, and loses nowt in translation.

Step forward, Evangelina Anderson, who was described by the father of Argentina’s Martin Demichelis as a nuisance “nightmare model” and who at one point retracted her statement that she would not distract Demichelis during the tournament.

“When I told the country I would be modest, I was saying a joke,” she stated. “Martin needed my congress.”