BackCleaning the underbelly of sport
If sports is an integral part of our lives, it ought to be subject to the same rules and code of conduct as any other activity
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What is it about sport that lends itself to so much sleaze and scandal? From Lance Armstrong’s shameful doping history to the Indian Premier League’s murky flirting with bookies, international sport appears to be awash in sordidness. The fact that soccer, the world’s most played and followed sport, lives with diving (faking an injury), shows how fine the line between fair and unfair in sports really is. The dive is a piece of chicanery that in any other form of human activity would invite instant punishment, but at the highest level of soccer it is treated with near reverence and belongs to that oxymoron solely reserved for sports—the professional foul.
It isn’t the only aberration to mar the beautiful game. In 2009, the Republic of Ireland, just a step away from qualifying for the 2010 World Cup finals in its playoff fixture against France, were literally robbed by a blatant piece of cheating by French star Thierry Henry. With the game minutes away from a draw, the French striker handled the ball not once but twice before passing it to William Gallas, who scored to give Les Bleus a narrow 2-1 win. The field referees missed the multiple handballs but Henry wasn’t shy of admitting to his fault after the game. Not that it changed the result and France, not Ireland, made it to the finals, with Henry rewarded for his efforts with a spot on the World Cup squad. It was perhaps poetic justice that after going through on such dubious grounds, France crashed out in the first round and the team left South Africa in disgrace.
Contrast the treatment of Henry with the sacking of the chief financial officer of Infosys Ltd’s BPO division for having failed to report overbilling in certain accounts by some employees. The unit’s chief executive too put in his papers on moral grounds.
Such niceties are alien to the game of cricket. In 2000, Hanse Cronje, who was then captain of the South African team, and Mohammad Azharuddin, who had captained the Indian team, were held guilty of fixing matches in return for cash and other gifts. Both were banished from the game, but nothing worse. Azhar went on to become a member of Parliament. Cronje suffered a bit more but by the time of his death in an air crash in 2002, there were voices suggesting he had suffered enough and deserved his place back in society.
That’s the other mystery. We are far more willing to tolerate misdemeanors and downright unlawful activities by our sports stars than we would by anyone else. Diego Maradona is a revered icon despite evidence of repeated substance abuse during his playing days.
Indeed, such is society’s tolerance of cheating in sports that at any point of time there are those involved who are busy trying to push the envelope further and further. In 2006, German track coach Thomas Springstein received a 16-month suspended jail sentence for supplying doping products to a minor. In itself, there was nothing unique about the event—doping in sports is as common as, well, winning. But as the Smithsonian wrote in 2012, by trying to use an experimental gene therapy for anemia, Springstein added a wholly new dimension to the cheater’s lexicon—gene doping. No need to bother any more about conventional tests for drugs or foreign products in the bloodstream; “gene doping would simply alter an athlete’s own DNA to produce performance-enhancing substances."
If sports is an integral part of our lives, it ought to be subject to the same rules and code of conduct as any other activity. Salman Butt, Mohammed Asif and Mohammad Amir may have served their term for their spot-fixing crimes. But vast swathes of the game, notably in India, need a far more rigorous cleansing.
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