IT DOESN’T matter what age you are reading this, be you in your teens, twenties or of retired age, you can all remember watching sport as a kid.
Those glass-eyed days when everything was magical. When sport was just that, sport.
For me it started with the 1986 World Cup; the Seoul Olympics followed, before Italia 90 blew me away. As anyone gets older they realise that all might not have been as it seemed. We hear or read about games from our past and we wonder was there more to it than met the eye? Much like family secrets, which seems to ‘come out’ as you grow older, the same goes for sport.
Your parents make throw away comments like “sure they bought that World Cup” or “sure wasn’t he on drugs back then” to crush your idyllic views of a sporting masterpiece.
This sense of sporting time struck me again last weekend as we watched the World Athletics Championships. Weary after yet another doubt filled Tour De France, I faced, with hope, into the Athletics championships. An event, which as a kid, did more to teach you the flags of the World, more so than the techniques involved. Once more though, the cynicism of ageing came to the fore.
Unfortunately, the weekend’s highlight was a race over 100 metres between the so-far clean as a whistle Usain Bolt and the back from suspension for doping Gatlin. Then the thought struck me. When did we cross the line? When did we, as a society, just forget about sport and just accept the assumption of guilt for all? Will we ever look at sport the same again?
