Many of us have chuckled at the penis enlargement trickery that went on at the Winter Olympics. What we won’t have cottoned on to is that such generalised tumescence stands as a perfect metaphor for the — ahem — growth of contemporary sport.
The modern industry of sport has swollen to an unprecedented size.
Some examples. The Fifa World Cup in North America and Mexico in June-July will feature 48 teams, making it the largest yet. No-one is going to explain the new Champions League format on the back of an envelope. It’s too complicated.
And starting at the end of March and ending on the last day of May, the Indian Premier League (IPL) goes on for nine weeks. If you’re historically minded, that’s longer than it took US soldiers to wrest Iwo Jima in the Pacific from the Japanese in World War 2.
Other examples abound. European club rugby has not one but two major competitions on its calendar, both featuring South African teams: the United Rugby Championship (URC) and the Champions Cup (CC). The two run in parallel.
The scheduling in the CC is so truncated that tournament sponsor Investec has taken to flighting public service adverts on SuperSport to explain its formatting and scheduling convolutions. Once you must explain a format to a punter, you’ve lost them. This leads to the reasonable question: whose interests does the CC actually serve? Last on the list, surely, are the fans.
Like much else in life, sport benefits from transparency and plain-speaking. One reason football and television go together like brandy and Coke is that no matter where you are in the world, you understand it at a glance. A green pitch contains a red team and a blue team separated by a white line. Both teams aim to score a goal on the opposite side of the pitch. Hands can’t be used.
Whether you live in Montevideo or Mogadishu, the game is self-explanatory, hence its global appeal. Aside from a handball here and an offside there, it makes perfect sense. It transcends language and culture, which is why football is the world’s pre-eminent sport.
Tournaments like the CC that don’t make sense (or are too long) threaten their own legitimacy. Without legitimacy, they become hollow spectacles. If this is too absolute, let’s rephrase: tournaments that don’t make sense encourage cynicism, at the very least. Self-preservation and cynicism are everywhere in the CC, as they are in the World Cup and the IPL.
Teams hoping for a top eight finish in the URC often field weakened teams in the CC, as, say, the Bulls did in their visit to Franklin’s Gardens to play Northampton Saints before Christmas. Their “rotation” policy didn’t end well: the Saints beat them by 45 points. You could almost hear the knives being sharpened by folk back home calling for coach Johan Ackermann’s head.
Were such results rare, they would be aberrations. Alas, they are commonplace, particularly for the Bulls and the other South African teams in the CC.
The Bulls would argue that the attritional nature of the game means it’s impossible to field a first-choice side in both competitions. Fair enough, but why not confine yourself to just one?
The answer is that with the CC’s centralised revenue share model, the Bulls get paid handsomely for participating. True, Europe’s storied club teams such as Leinster and Bordeaux earn more for progressing deep into the tournament — as they’re likely to again do this year — but the financial rewards for just competing are considerable. The expedience of fielding “weaker” teams rules the day, especially if you’ve started the CC badly.
One reason football and television go together like brandy and Coke is that no matter where you are in the world, you understand it at a glance
The architecture of sport, at its most basic, is akin to a pyramid within a circle. At the wide bottom you have the fans, often from the same city or region as the team they support. Above them you have federations, intermediaries, sponsors and broadcasters. At the top of the triangle are those whose God-given gifts allow them to do things on the sports field most of us can only dream about.
Importantly, however, whether your name is Handré Pollard or Ben Stokes, you are surrounded by the sport you have chosen to play — the circle enveloping the pyramid. It has taken you to where you now find yourself, giving you your identity. As the saying goes: “No-one is bigger than the game.”
That, at least, was the theory. But that’s not how the system works nowadays. In the contemporary situation, you have stars — Cristiano Ronaldo, Novak Djokovic — who are patently bigger than the game. And you have federations — the International Olympic Committee — which are bigger than the game over which they preside. Sport is a bad case of the broken whole.
The stars themselves live in a celebrity bubble, almost touchingly out of touch with reality. Was it not Stokes who said after Australia had beaten England 4-1 a couple of months ago to keep the Ashes, and with some of the Tests Down Under lasting a mere two days: “I really think Brendon McCallum [the England coach] and I are the two guys to take this team forward.”
Are you kidding?
So what, I hear you huffing. That’s the way it is. Well, here’s the thing. What the bloated world of modern sport does is threaten what we might call sport’s soul or integrity. In essence, sport is a delicate wager. It says: “Here is a fair competition between two teams or individuals on a relatively even playing field where the outcome is not known in advance.”
Those values are easy to besmirch. One example. The 1998 Tour de France infamously came to be dominated by the “Festina Affair” when widespread doping among teams — including Festina — was exposed by the French police. It was so bad that of the 189 riders who started that year’s tour in Dublin, only 96 completed the race.
The tour finished as usual on the Champs-Élysées, but the race director spent an inordinate amount of time at the start of each stage trying to persuade disgruntled riders to get back into the saddle. They hated the police, calling them Nazis. And they found the media frenzy, once the doping genie was out of the bottle, unbearable.
The following year’s tour was dubbed “The Tour of Renewal”. It was a clever conceit, putting distance between it and the race’s immediate past. Riding for US Postal that year, Lance Armstrong won the first of his seven tours in 1999, spending much of his time, we subsequently found out, “loading the cannon”, slang for injecting the prohibited substance EPO beneath the skin.
At a pre-race medical ahead of the prologue in 1999, the needle-mark bruises on his forearms were so obvious that he asked Emma O’Reilly, a US Postal masseuse, to disguise them, suggesting base or foundation. That won’t do, she said, and used concealer.
The contemporary reality of the tour is all about concealment. Small concealed motors on bikes, drug cocktails administered so cleverly they leave no trace in the body — the dopers are always one elegant step ahead of the underfunded testers.
The skulduggery has come a long way since George Hincapie, once Armstrong’s US Postal teammate, admitted that vials of drugs were tossed overboard during the ferry crossing from Ireland to France, where the police were waiting in 1998.
This, in a way, isn’t sport; it’s meta sport, sport so compromised that it can be enjoyed as a spectacle but not completely trusted. There’s dissonance here.
What we know as sport isn’t really sport at all. More accurately, it’s sportacle — equal portions sport and spectacle. The problem here, once again, is cynicism. The problem with cynicism is that it begets cynicism. A cynical system is an unstable system.
As we South Africans know, match-fixing and doping traditionally find fertile ground in cynical systems. Hansie Cronje saw widespread bribery and match-fixing around him in the late 1990s. A naturally greedy man, he directed some of the riches on offer towards his bank account.
Looked at from a slightly different angle, when last was there a big doping scandal in world athletics, a sport that is widely spoken about as being awash with drugs? There hasn’t been one. Doesn’t that tell you something about how compromised the system really is?
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