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NIALL KIELYdiscusses sport

No failed drug test in Barca games but some positives 

SOME ENCOURAGING adumbrations emerged from the European athletics championships.

First, white men can sprint. Christophe Lemaitre’s sub-10-seconds 100 metres in July signalled raw speed, but his mature delivery on that inherited zip under big-event pressure in Barcelona showcased serious competitive talent.

He’s just 20, remember, and his gawky, lean strength can only toughen.

His technique is not yet efficient enough to take him down to the serious sub-10 zones: that’ll improve.

He got a lousy start in Barca, yet he came through like a seasoned finisher. Then he added the 200 metres in a similarly competitive race.

Lemaitre’s emergence as the first white sprinter to break the 10-seconds barrier raises once more the issue of putative biological differences between races.

“Yes, he happens to be white,” ex-sprinter supreme Michael Johnson wrote last weekend, “. . . (But) it is a step backwards in race relations to make his skin colour the most significant point of discussion.”

Lemaitre’s sub-10 time is a long way indeed behind an almost entirely Africa-descent legion of sprinters.

Yet race in athletics is a slippery topic, and a cursory look indicates that skin pigmentation can actually cloud the facts.

The argument that only those descended from west African coastal states gene-pools can sprint fast is undermined by the fact that many states in that zone – including the Guineas, Ghana and Congo – have produced no real big-event sprinting medals.

And studies of African-Americans have shown genetic make-ups of considerable genetic diversity.

The second positive from Barca was that times and performances were goodish, rather than outstanding, with lots of blanket finishes to sprints, particularly: in Lemaitre’s 100 metres, the second to fifth men were separated by less than one-hundredth of a second.

That and the pattern of other results suggests the rigour and extent of the drug-testing regimes may at last be deterring the dopers and cheats.

Finally, that gem Derval O’Rourke polished a few more facets of her disarming and engaging self.

I particularly warmed to her wondering if she now needed more heavy lifting in the gym. Then she looked over at her 100m hurdles conqueror from Turkey, and thought: “At least I can still wear a dress.”

My word, flummery has ’em flummoxed

AS PG WODEHOUSE might have observed, there’s very little difficulty distinguishing between a ray of sunshine and a Kilkennyman with a grievance.

And yes, I do realise that linking dyspepsia with Kilkennyness could be oxymoronic.

One Gerry Moran, of Coote’s Lane in the Marble City, wrote during the week to the highbrow, epistolary section of this organ, pronouncing himself flummoxed by words like flummery in last week’s column obituarising Alex Higgins.

I know that straying from middle dictionaryland carries the risk that its poultice may draw out the precious and pernickety. But Mr Moran’s generous suggestion that I deserve a gold medal (it’ll by my first such bauble since the fáinne oir, aged nine) for “verbosity” seem to misunderstand that word.

Verbose means using more words than necessary. I may, for divilment, peddle arcane or even tumid language, but I’d argue the splendid words he cited so vexedly all earned their passage on last Saturday’s vessel.

And aren’t they fun?

Oscar Wilde would doubtless have noted at this point that the only thing worse than not being on the Letters page is . . . but ooops, there I go again, my ellipsis is showing.

Future of rugby disturbingly All Black

LAST JUNE, in a vicious aside that cut to the Northern Hemisphere quick because it reminded us pithily of the real world order as we look to next summer’s Rugby World Cup in New Zealand, the Kiwi assistant coach Steve Hansen looked forward to “the big boys’ league”.

We may have yearned for a schadenfreude smiting, but we’ve learned from the first few weeks of the Tri-Nations Hansen’s worldview was quite realistic.

His boss Graham Henry, a man for whose deadpan physiognomy the word lugubrious seems inadequate, opined: “Having three of the four top teams in the world makes highly competitive.”

And this was just after Argentina had run up a 41-13 scoreline against grand slam champions France! (nasterminded by one Felipe Contepomi, who scored 31 of those points.)

Thus far, the Tri-Nations has been salutary, scintillating, scary; but also riveting, riproaring and not less than remarkable: unmissable Saturday morning stuff. And having seen the under-age world cup earlier this year, during which the baby All Blacks absolutely wasted their contemporaries, the future is a disturbing chiaroscuro, the palette dominantly black.

Tom Jones (does anyone else find it as difficult to utter the words “Sir Tom” as it seems risible to say “Sir Anthony”?), aged 70, stretched this week for the top of the British charts with his raw blues and gospel album, Praise Blame. Yet more proof that elderly artists seeking a younger audience must go the Johnny Cash route: hit ’em with the most unreconstructed, old-fashioned music. Sing it, and they will come.

That’s the visceral beauty of what the All Blacks are now effecting. They have only three truly outstanding players – McCaw, Carter, Smith and, verging on it, number eight Read – but they have a decent squad and a nonpareil team ethic. Tactics are simple, yet irresistible. They’re physical, pacey, aggressive and enterprising – clinical accuracy at full speed.

It’s not that we’re not at the races. We’ll be lucky to find the entrance gate.

Boules gets fashion-house makeover

IN THE Francophone world it is ubiquitous. Most of us tourists to that country associate it with sun-dappled courts in rural and village France, played by middleaged men in berets, probably smoking and with pastis to hand: metal boules thump and skid off fine and dusty gravel, or thunk into the backboard.

Yet nothing’s sacred, not even petanque. As the French seek Olympic recognition for the sport, the fashion houses have moved in.

The larger supermarkets are this summer flogging floral and other designs to women, Louis Vuitton’s balls come in leather-cased glory for a grand and Chanel has topped that with a designer set cosseted in hand-woven wicker, retailing at a very Parisian €4,000. Ye gods.

Corrida bull at least lives well first

AS CATALONIA prepared last month to outlaw la corrida de toros, Richard Fitzpatrick on these pages noted Ernest Hemingway’s trenchant view that only mountaineering, motor racing and bullfighting were true sports.

“All the rest,” wrote the author of Death in the Afternoon, “are merely games.”

Interestingly, Hemingway also noted back in the early 1930s that such popularity as bullfighting enjoyed in Barcelona was “on a fake basis” because la corrida was attended in that city in much the same crude way as the Roman vulgus flocked to the colosseum; an analogy as cruel as it was accurate.

Papa H viewed the Catalans as down-to-earth people, pragmatic traders who lacked the poetic soul and morbid attraction to ritual of the Castilians, and much has been made in recent weeks of the burgeoning hatred in Catalonia of all things Spanish.

Yet toreo has never been more popular across the border in French Catalonia, making even more ironic the fact that on one side of the Pyrenees, the French Catalans use bullfighting to mark their distance from and distaste for Paris; while south of the mountains, Spanish Catalans have now banned the spectacle to symbolise their separateness from the Madrilenos.

For a sport enjoyed only in Iberia, France and the five taurine nations of Latin America, its language and metaphor have penetrated our language remarkably deeply and, as recently as last Monday, Tom Humphreys painted word-pictures of Dublin’s footballers “charging at the swirling cape of Mickey Harte”.

The animal rights brigade, of course, loved the Barcelona ban, blithely and syllogistically ignoring the hypocrisy of citing cruelty concerns for sparking the legal change – when it was clearly a politically-charged decision and outcome.

What would your taurine choices be, reader? The domestic animal’s option: grabbed away from mother soon after birth, horns sawn off, tail docked, penned with countless others and fed, Allah-knows-what, processed feed until it ends in some stinking abattoir or halal slaughterroom? Or life with mother until you’re mature, five glorious years in wild pasture and then a sudden death in the arena (bloody, and often messy, admittedly)?

I once knew a man called Jesus.

He was a barman in a long, cool old Madrid bar we Irish journalists used to close after work at the 1982 World Cup. He was a lean streak of human misery, but I took a perverse liking to him and we “conversed” each night using a 1930s phrase-book I’d found at home that included such useful imperatives as: “Barber, put the irons on my moustaches.”

One night I told him a joke that involved an American bullfight aficionado, enthused by Hemingway, who came to Spain for toreo, but also to dine on bull’s testicles poached in red wine. The punchline came after the Yank was served a particularly tiny pair of cojones one night, queried the dish, and was told:

“Ah, senor, the torero does not always win.”

With great difficulty, I translated it for him, and he never spoke to me again.

He was a part-time bullfighter. He’d never heard a joke in worse taste.