JOHNNY WATTERSONtalks about sport
Some things are a racing certainty
IF IT has already been empirically proven that a minor pushed into the professional tennis grinder as a young teenager will come out the far end as mince, it’s equally probable if you put a 16-year-old boy on a motorbike he will come bouncing across the gravel pit before you can say “too fast into the hairpin”.
This week the US Open at Flushing Meadow made its way through the second week of the women’s event to today’s final with the average age substantially up from the days when 14-year-old Martina Hingis was a regular crowd pleaser. The change is seen as a positive. More disappointed adults, less suicidal adolescents.
Tennis put the brakes on “awesome-teen-phenoms” blinding the world for a few seasons before crashing and burning in the full glare of, shock horror, their media handlers and sponsors. Now players under 16 years of age, such as Britain’s Junior Wimbledon winner Laura Robson, are dramatically limited in the number of senior professional events they are allowed to compete.
Last weekend in San Marino teenage racer Shoya Tomizawa died when Scott Redding and Alex de Angelis accidentally ran over him at over 100 mph after Tomizawa fell off his machine during a Moto2 Grand Prix race.
The Japanese rider was 19 years old, while Redding is not yet 18. The British teenager made history two years ago when they put him on a racing machine aged 15 years and 170 days. He pleased that day by winning the Grand Prix and making history as the youngest winner ever.
Moto has done much to make the sport safe, although its revered sibling, road racing, remains a serial killer.
The ever-original Hunter S Thompson made more than one observation in his time. He had a knack of nailing a feeling, a political character or a particular phrase that summed up the time or captured the moment.
Doubtlessly fired up on a cocktail of exotic substances, the late Hunter S observed “being shot out of a cannon is always better than being squeezed out of a tube”. True. But in a 15-year-old boy, it seems dead wrong to encourage it.
Ferrari still up to old Todt tricks
ARTICLE 39.1 is a regulatory piece of architecture in Formula One, which should embarrass an organisation that seems incapable of blushing.
Whatever about poor old Max Mosley, the sprightly former FIA president, engaging in what he believed was a private spank-happy session in the cellar with naked women, Jean Todt, Mosley’s presidential successor, has been forced to do a public and deeply ironic Pontius Pilate on the latest allegations involving premeditated cheating in F1.
The 39.1 legislation was introduced after the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, where Ferrari driver Michael Schumacher won after his team-mate Rubens Barrichello was repeatedly ordered to move aside by the team management. Barrichello was told to do so by the then sporting director of Ferrari, the amazing Mr Todt.
It was an outraged Mosley, who at the time fined Todt and Ferrari $1 million (€785,000) for that blatant staging of the podium places.
Now Frenchman Todt presides over the whole shooting gallery and what a surprise to hear Ferrari have escaped punishment for repeat offending.
You might have expected something more creative from a cutting-edge operation like Ferrari but it appeared the Italian manufacturer did exactly the same thing again, the Todt manoeuvre. Accusations that Felipe Massa moved aside so Fernando Alonso could win the German Grand Prix drew Ferrari a $100,000 (€78,500) fine for bringing the sport into disrepute, an amount of money that wouldn’t even keep the eye candy floating round the pit lane for a race weekend.
The dear old spanker declared Ferarri should be thrown out of the championship. But after a hearing in Paris the governing body felt it was more a venial than a mortal sin committed in Germany.
Ferrari have always sailed close to the wind especially in the Todt years. Of course, as president, he stood aside for the Parisian conclave of the FIA.
But in the scheme of things his organisation prosecuted the case that Ferrari used an illegal tactic, one Todt may have even invented himself.
Testing time for Ireland and Kidney
SOUTH AFRICA ended their home international season with their Bok tails between their legs. Five defeats this year from 10 games and the opposition are laughing like hyenas. By going down 41-39 to the Wallabies in a cracker at Bloemfontein last weekend, Springbok coach Pieter De Villiers is taking familiar home flak.
De Villiers is a specialist in seeding newspapers with poorly-judged sound bites. But it will be interesting to see how the media react to Ireland and Declan Kidney after November’s Autumn Series. In this calendar year Ireland have played eight international matches (including the one against the Maoris) and won three of them against Italy, England and Wales. With South Africa, Samoa, New Zealand and Argentina due to visit soon, the stats could begin to look a little negative for the Cork man, who in contrast to De Villiers, knows when to keep his own counsel.
The results of the November series should more accurately reflect Ireland’s position in international rugby. From 12 matches this year Ireland can win a maximum of seven but the tally could also dip below a 50 per cent strike rate if we win just one of the four November games. In a season where the Six Nations will count for little if a World Cup flop ensues, it could promote a serious bout of soul searching.
Olympic glory, but at what cost?
LIBERAL THINKING doesn’t run too deep in the IOC or the House of Lords.
Little surprise then that the perceived threat of cheating in sport may allow governments to amend statutes and curtail civil liberties. What is strange is that athletes seem ambivalent, that they may actually consider blindly signing up to an agreement that would trample over hard-earned laws in order to chase the dream of an Olympic medal.
In 2012 it is likely Irish athletes will have to agree to their rooms being raided at any time by anti-doping officials as a condition of taking part in the London Olympic Games. It appears the Irish team will have little wriggle room as that august body, the IOC, has already indicated it is backing the plans.
Britain’s Sports Minister Gerry Sutcliffe said he had proposed to the IOC and London 2012 organisers that athletes should agree to be searched at any time. In the same breath he declared he didn’t want to “criminalise” the athletes. He mentioned nothing about humiliation or degradation.
Then again, athletes have been ritually broken down over the years by urinating into jars in front of strangers.
Sutcliffe didn’t explain how an anti-drugs official might come to suspect certain athletes or why they may decide to raid a particular room. Will it be the foreign athletes, who will draw most of the early-morning knocks or just the ladies with the large muscles? Will they target weightlifters and sprinters with the sniffer dogs or go on the gut feeling that the swimmers are missing their neoprene suits and need a little something to give more bang for their buck?
Earlier this year Lord Moynihan proposed a new Bill in the House of Lords to give police the required powers to search for sports drugs.
Moynihan, a former sports minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, now sits as a privileged Tory peer.
Somewhat hilariously, the British Athletes Commission have sought reassurances from the British Olympics Association that “stop and search” tactics will not be randomly used on Olympic athletes.
More pragmatically they point out that athletes are unlikely to bring drugs into the athletes’ village and they asked about the Usain Bolts of this world, the track and field stars at the top of the sport, who jet into the country shortly before their event takes place and stay in private accommodation. It seems all rather beastly and ill-thought out.
Moynihan, a former Olympic rower, hopes it will become law by July of next year.
Because of the lamentable tradition of Olympic sports, we have come not to trust the word of athletes, but politicians and their motives even less. When the first Springer spaniel emerges from a bedroom with a Moldovan boxer’s diabetic syringe in its mouth and the athlete is cross-examined in broken English for three hours by a man wearing a large utility belt and dressed in a quasi-military uniform, we will all cry foul.
The Moldovan could be Chinese or Irish. It could be Ken Egan or Paddy Barnes or Derval O’Rourke fighting for a medal the very next morning. The organisers will argue that to keep the sport clean there will be some mistakes. Alas, we can tell you now what those “mistakes” will be.
If it comes to trusting the Masai runner or the Tory peer, we’ll take David Rushida thanks.
'Role model' not the sharpest pencil
IF WAYNE Rooney had been gifted another talent he might have become the Archbishop of Westminster or have beaten Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi into dignified protest in Croxteth. Instead he kicks ball.
Manchester United and England have him score goals, shift units of boots and sell hectares of shirts in far flung places, where he may well be as famous as Suu Kyi.
For all that Rooney gets a 21st century knighthood and title – “Role Model”.
After the latest cheque-book disgorgement from, amongst others, “Juicy Jen”, which earned her a lucrative 15 minutes of fame, there is the wreckage of Rooney’s wretched, despairing wife Coleen and Juicy Jen’s parents, now “on holiday” as they believed that their prostitute daughter worked in a bar.
She targeted footballers because they were “rich” and “not the sharpest pencils in the box”, a description eminently more believable and for many footballers less impossibly aspirational than role model.
Juiciness aside, the most famous face in British football fell for the fidelity of a jobbing escort girl. As the archbishop might have said, “sweet divine Jesus”.
