Tipping Point: Boston Marathon an endurance test for more than just runners

On the run up to today’s Boston Marathon helicopters have been flying grid patterns over the city running tests for the National Nuclear Security Administration to measure baseline radiation levels along the race route.

They will be joined in the skies during the race by surveillance drones buzzing over the more than one million runners and spectators.

Up to 4,000 undercover officers will mingle in the crowds, part of Boston’s security ‘lockdown’ which features restrictions on everything from bulky clothing to liquid containers and not petting the on-duty bomb sniffer dogs.

All of it is part of a logistical exercise so massive there’s notable reluctance to put a figure on what it costs, which is silly because only the most witless could baulk at how much it costs to do what has to be done.

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It has to be done in Boston because four years ago two inadequates decided they were entitled to work out their psychosexual religious hang-ups by leaving two improvised bombs crammed with nails and ball-bearings near the marathon finish line.

The explosions killed three people and injured hundreds. Giving into such viciousness by flinching at the cost of trying to prevent a similar atrocity isn’t an option for anyone anywhere.

But there’s no point pretending either that the consequences of a sorry catalogue of terror-related incidents have transformed many high-profile sporting events from displays of communal joy into fraught concentrations of public anxiety.

All too often the most important result isn’t who comes first but who doesn’t get hurt.

It means turning something as positive as the Boston Marathon into an endurance test for more than the just the runners. It will be the same on the streets of Sunday’s London Marathon where evidence of the public’s vulnerability to attention-seeking inadequacy is all too painfully recent.

The world has become desperately uneasy with itself, making it impossible to ignore fears of possible calamity becoming near-inevitable, and sport is no exception to this deep-rooted public anxiety.

Dumb luck

Because despite all the hundreds of millions of investment thrown at high-profile public events, even those with a stake in the security industry concede that foiling someone intent on destroying lives ultimately often comes down to dumb luck.

It’s the irony of most surveillance and security mechanisms that they only really come into their own after the event. Like so much of the medical industry it’s often more about identification than prevention. It has to be done but it’s interesting to ponder to what degree how much of it is ultimately a cosmetic exercise.

Whether it’s Boston or London, the reality is that it’s impossible to make 26 miles completely safe from fanatics determined to justify their own pathetic prejudices in convenient fundamentalism.

All it takes is a lone figure getting lucky and the consequences can be nightmarish. And as some of our own home-grown fundamentalist fanatics chillingly used to point out about their own murder attempts, getting lucky just the once is all they need.

Nostalgia for more strategic murdering bastards of the past might be incongruous but the security reality for any significant event now makes arrangements from even a decade ago seem laughably naive.

For a long time it was sport’s good fortune to largely escape the sort of ‘spectaculars’ that those now prepared to attack innocents anywhere at any time are desperate to achieve.

However, there can hardly be a significant organisation that can now afford not to legislate, and be seen to legislate for, the possibility of some sort of attack.

Armed police and the vast security paraphernalia of societies determinedly trying to head-off disaster before it happens have become so ubiquitous it’s almost possible to forget how alien such a situation is.

But underneath that instinct to try and normalise even the most abnormal situations is a deep-rooted acknowledgement that it’s probably only a matter of when and not if the terror opportunities sport inevitably provides will be exploited by those determined to kill.

Last week’s attack on the Borussia Dortmund bus thankfully occurred far from any stadium and caused only minor injuries. But the attention commanded through a top football team being targeted shows how much of a focal point sport is.

It’s why the nightmare for police services around the world continues to be an incident inside a packed stadium with thousands of vulnerable people concentrated into a small space.

Strategic planning

How close the French authorities came to such a disaster at the Stade De France in 2015 was inevitably overlooked by the death toll at the Bataclan theatre on the same night. But it was mostly only through good fortune rather than any strategic planning that it was averted.

One of the suicide bombers waited until the game was underway before trying enter the stadium, drawing more attention to himself rather than if he’d been one of thousands pouring in. He also tried to enter close to the players' tunnel where security was heaviest and was noticed acting suspiciously.

If he’d shown up on time, gone to a different gate and kept his cool it could have been a massacre. Government agencies know that. So do those determined to kill who are unlikely to make the same mistakes again. Most of all we know it.

Life, including sport, goes on because it has to. It’s why today’s Boston Marathon has to be run no matter how overwhelming the potential risks and costs. Not running it would be, to use the cliche, a victory for terror.

Except looking at the maelstrom of dread which has transformed so many events into logistical headaches to be stoically endured, and the undercurrent of public anxiety accompanying them, it’s hard to identify any sort of triumph, except perhaps in terms of perseverance.

And how dispiriting is it that sport has come to that.