If you go back over it, the papers used to bung in infographics showing postponed or scuppered sport tournaments in the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic’s rapid and rapacious progress here, there and everywhere. But the tabulation, or exposition, had to be given up very soon when it came home that not even half the story could thus be narrated, so grim was the reality.
There was hardly any sport spared by the bloodcurdling disease, with the world’s biggest events coming to be shelved and the story inexorably hitting its climax when the 2020 Olympics got put off till next year.
Things have since come to such a pass that lots of people ~ not all of them so much sawdust ~ have openly spoken of the purported stupidity of fixing the quadrennial showpiece for 2021, given that, as of now, there is no one to contradict the basic proposition that we are in for the long haul.
It is not going to let go of us in a short while, or so think millions of people across the world. But as officially temporarily held-over events, major as well as minor, pile up virtually wherever organised, professionalised sport exists, organisers’ collective response, despite exceptional voices in dissent, seems only to have a vague optimism at its core ~ and not much else.
They, of course, were not being expected to cry buckets and thump their chests in mournful resignation but frequent assertions of a will to complete the “current” season before ushering in the new, as in the multi-billion business that is European football, give away an existential crisis which sport, with its bluster, seems fundamentally ill-equipped to be honest about. Some have moved on and bide their time all right, but not all.
Those who find themselves unable to do so are high-stake players and their takings are proportionately impressive. But when you consider Barcelona’s 70 per cent pay cut ~ and Leo Messi is on their star-spangled roster ~ and how English Premier League superstars bristle at being made to part with some of their annual bounty, it gets really hard not to think that the game is riding for a fall.
What at the moment has the feel of unmeant optimism buttressed by a bull-headed defiance of reality may have a lot to do with a desperate desire, on the organisers’ part, to square themselves with assorted sponsors and television. What yesterday appeared to be a well-oiled machine purring quite satisfactorily has all of a sudden ground to a screeching halt, with lounge-suited executives too having to make do with thinning wallets.
Several celebrities have predicted harder days ahead, with Jonty Rhodes going to the extent of blurting it out that nothing will ever be the same again. It is a truth sport does not want to be seen as accepting. But it will, some day.