Sporting Craziness

I’m not too sure what’s been happening to the world of sport lately, but more and more it’s been closer to resembling soap opera than human contest with rules. It won’t be long before we begin tuning in to Eastenders and Coronation Street for our fix of “real life”.

First we had Lance Armstrong with his so called confession, which I’m sure to most people watching was nothing more than a publicity stunt. For years he has denied ever having used drugs, he even testified to it under oath. Even after the recent report which contained testimony from many riders he continued to deny it.

Now, suddenly, he seems to have had some sort of change of heart and grown a desire to be honest. Or has he?  None of us will ever know probably, until some book comes out in the future when he requires a bit more publicity and a bit more money.

It is a very sad story really, a man who is diagnosed with Cancer and is obviously driven enough to not let it beat him, such a strong-willed attitude which should be inspiring for anyone. Never give up. But he has now become so driven that he will lie and cheat his way continually through the rest of his life just to appear the best. It is a story of pantomime, not reality.

Then in the last week we’ve had the Eden Hazard and the ball boy incident which is even more bizarre as Premiership football continues to plumb depths of absurdity not considered even possible. And why do they keep happening with Chelsea players?

As bad as it was for Hazard to be kicking at the seventeen-year old to get at the ball, what on earth was he doing clutching at it and lying on top of it in the first place? It was as if he had just taken a one goal lead in the playground and was attempting to end the game and take the ball home. It may sound cynical, but was the ball boy just attempting to get a bit of notoriety? After all his Twitter followers have gone up by over 15,000%!

Who knows where the future now lies for sport in general and what can possibly trump the craziness that has been going on in the first few months of January? Well, here at least are my predictions.

In February Paulo di Canio will be stripped of the Fair Play Award that he won in 2001 after it emerges that, far from carrying out an instinctive gesture of goodwill towards the Everton goalkeeper, he was actually being paid by a dodgy bookmaker to catch the ball at that particular moment in the game. The fact that he could claim later that he had done it for the injured player was pure luck for him and the bookmaker in question who managed to embezzle several million pounds, which he later lost during the Lords Test Match of 2005 having paid Kevin Pieterson to take catches.

In the summer chaos will ensue during the Open Championship at Muirfield after a pigeon fancier trains his birds to steal golf balls in mid-air. Tiger Woods will have to take ten tee shots at the fourth hole before one lands on the fairway, and only because Phil Mickelson and Ernie Els all drive at the same time to confuse the birds. Ironically this leads to the invention of speed golf which will go on to electrify the world (in a way in which only golf can). It will involve every player in the tournament playing every hole at the same time and lead to some hilarious, and often disastrous, fights amongst players. Golf will thus become the new football.

Then on the first anniversary of the end of the 2012 Olympics, rumours will emerge that the games never actually took place at all. The spectators will be tested for drugs and will show small traces of a hallucinogen. Hypnotists will step in and through regressions all they will be able to remember is sitting in the back of a dark truck, being fed McDonalds and Coca-Cola through a straw, while watching videos of past, fleeting, British triumphs. And finally an assassination of Seb Coe will lead to several so-called British winners dying in bizarre ways in a strange cross-pollination of Capricorn One and Final Destination. In the end the BBC will be declared the main culprits of this complex series of counterfeit events and will lose another Director General.