In newspaper patter, the sports section has always been known as the “toy department”. This is because, Peter Wilby argued in the Guardian back in 2006, “sports news meets lower standards than most other news”. Wilby said this was because it was written for fans, who only wanted “endless idle gossip about who should be dropped, who should be signed, who will win next Saturday”. Fans, he wrote, who “like writers to reflect back the same emotions – anger at defeat, ecstasy after victory – that they feel themselves.” If there was once some truth in Wilby’s words, it seems things have changed since he wrote them. In 2015 the biggest sports stories were the scandals at Fifa and the IAAF. And so along with the fans’ anger and ecstasy, other emotions, indignation, at the shamelessness of the administrators who run the sports, and mistrust, too, of some of the men and women who compete in them.
And so on to 2016, a year that promises to bring fans more of all four feelings. The big events begin with the Six Nations. Fresh starts for England under Eddie Jones, and, across the channel, France under Guy Novès. Jones’s first test a trip to Edinburgh to play Scotland, the one European team to exceed expectations in the World Cup just gone. Waiting, Wales and Ireland, who have split all the last four titles between them, and are looking to kick on again if they can.
In March, the World T20 in India, the modern home of cricket, with England looking to make amends again for their poor performance in the previous edition. And in April, the Masters, and the first major round in one of the most exciting rivalries in sport, between Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth, their year building towards the Ryder Cup at Hazeltine in late September. Before then, Wimbledon, and the annual explosion of excitement over Andy Murray’s latest campaign.
Looming over all that, two events. The European Championship in June and July, run by a body whose president is currently suspended from all football-related activities. The tournament is larger and longer than ever now it has been expanded to 24 teams, four home nations among them. On 16 June, England play Wales in Lens, a match that will stop the traffic. And then, in August, the greatest show on earth, the Olympic Games. Its showpiece sport, athletics, in the thick of the worst crisis in its history, and at the same time graced by the biggest sports star on the planet, Usain Bolt. Trying not only to become the first sprinter in history to win a third 100m title, but the first, too, to win a triple-triple of all the sprint events. Bolt will be competing in a stadium, the Estádio Olímpico João Havelange, named after a man who was forced to resign from the honorary presidency of Fifa because he took kickbacks from a marketing agency.
The Olympics will be beaten in, as it often is, by a steady drum-roll of bad news stories. In March, the World Indoor Athletics Championships take place in Portland, Oregon. Russia, suspended until at least the end of that month, will not be represented. Whether their team make it to the Olympics depends on their ability to prove their athletes are working in a “safe and secure environment”. So says the International Association of Athletics Federations president, Seb Coe. “If we don’t get the change we want,” Coe says, then “the clean athletes are going to have to sit this out.”
Some think these are empty threats. Weigh Coe’s words against those of the IOC president, Thomas Bach, who says he is confident “Russia will cooperate to make progress and to be sure that Russian athletics are compliant with Wada”, and so secure their place at the Games. Dick Pound, the author of Wada’s recent report, is certain that Russia will be allowed to compete. “I’d be very surprised if the organisations that have to declare them compliant again would not be cooperative in making that happen.”
That, at least, is a problem the IOC can control, unlike some others. Brazil is in recession, its worst in 80 years. The economy contracted by 4.5% over the course of 2015. Right now unemployment is at 8%, its highest level in six years, and inflation is running over 10%. Moody’s have cut the country’s credit rating down to just above junk status, and recently announced that they are planning to review it over again.
The government is making massive spending cuts, even as it is embroiled in one of the worst political scandals in the country’s history. “Operation Car Wash”, a police investigation into the state oil firm Petrobras, has led to the arrests of dozens of industrialists, and accusations against at least 50 politicians, mainly from the ruling coalition. President Rousseff is facing impeachment.
Last summer, hundreds of thousands turned out in different cities across Brazil, to march in protest. What appetite, in the thick of all this, for the Olympics? Some test events have already been disrupted by protests, with a road cycling competition being re-routed and rescheduled to avoid a clash with an anti-government protest on Copacabana beach.
Mindful of the public mood, organisers have said that they will slash the operating budget by between 10% and 30%, and that, in the words of their communications director, “the days of lavish spending are over”. They say the cuts will be made “behind the scenes”, without compromising the Olympic experience for the competitors or spectators. One recent proposal was to make the athletes pay for their own air-conditioning. One thing unlikely to be cut is the security, which will likely ensure that any protests are off-site and out of sight.
Against that backdrop, the Games begin to feel like a big boondoggle. Overpriced and unwanted, struggling to justify their enormous cost. Few cities seem to want to host future Olympics. Toronto decided not to bid for the 2024 Games because there was so little corporate support. Boston and Hamburg dropped out because public opinion was against it. “The people of Hamburg want a city policy that is geared to the basic needs of the population, rather than focusing on global events or flagship projects,” explained a spokesperson for the NOlympia movement. A soundbite ever so similar to those given by a spokesperson for the equivalent campaign in Boston. “There are better ways to spend public resources than on a three-week party.” At the moment, four cities are still in the running. It was a similar story with the 2022 Winter Olympics, awarded, in the end, to Beijing after Munich, Oslo, Stockholm, Lviv and Krakow all dropped out of the running.
It feels like there is a lot at stake on this Olympics, that they could be a pivotal point in the history of the Games. “Yes,” says Bach, “these times are difficult for sport. But yes, it is also an opportunity to renew the trust in this power of sport to change the world for the better.”
Perhaps. But at a moment when so many fans are wondering whether they can believe in what they are paying to watch, another year like the last would be more than many can stomach. Spot-fixing, price-gouging, bid-rigging, state-sponsored doping. For all the excitement and ecstasy 2016 will bring, there will be plenty of anger and indignation too. Life in the toy department is beginning to seem a serious business.
