23 June 2016

A Sportsman’s Sketches

With apologies to Ivan Turgenev.

by Neil Tidmarsh

It’s been a bad week for Russian sport.

The Russian soccer team are out of the Euro 2016 championships.  Beaten by giants, perhaps?  By Germany, or Spain, or Italy?  No.  By Wales.  And Slovakia.  In the first round. At least it means they can’t be thrown out now, a humiliation which was looming after a flare was let off in the Slovakia game in breach of the suspended disqualification handed out following the English match.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the IAAF has banned Russia’s athletics team from competing in the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games. The ban was imposed last November, following disclosures of state-endorsed doping, and this week the governing body of world athletics decided that Russia has failed to make sufficient improvements for the ban to be lifted for the Olympics.

It could easily get worse.  The World Anti-Doping Agency is investigating allegations of widespread drugs-cheating by Russia in the 2014 Winter Games at Sochi.  The allegations claim that the Russian ministry of sport and Russian security services were involved in the cheating. The investigators are due to report their findings on July 15. This week Wada officials said that Russia could be banned from all Olympic events if the allegations are found to be true.

Russia is due to host the World Cup in 2018 but even that is in jeopardy after the behaviour of Russian fans in France and the approval and applause granted them by various Russian officials and politicians.  Disgraceful, the way those thugs are corrupting a strictly amateur activity (drink too much, lose your head, throw things, run after like-minded idiots, run away from like-minded idiots, throw up, fall over, get arrested) with their dry and serious professional approach (martial arts expertise, military training, military discipline, military organisation).

What are Russia’s hooligans going to do now that their campaign in France has been suddenly cut short? A hero’s welcome on their return to Russia will be no compensation for all those lost opportunities to hit foreigners over the head with iron bars for the glory of the motherland. (I almost feel sorry for Alexander Shprygin, the far-right leader of the official Russian football supporters group, who was detained and deported from France a week ago after the trouble in Marseilles but slipped back into the country because he didn’t want to miss the match against Wales in Toulouse – only to see his Goliath beaten 3-0 by our Dafydd, and then to be arrested for being back in France).

How will President Putin and his regime prove Russia’s civilisation superior to that of the rest of the world now, especially if they’re banned from the 2016 Olympics and have the 2018 World Cup taken away from them?

Well, here’s an idea.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tournaments were all the rage in Europe.  Forget courtly images of chivalrous jousting between two sporting knights. Tournaments were ferocious war-games (or battles) fought between big teams (or small armies) of opposing men-at-arms, across miles and miles of open territory.  Real armour and real weapons were used.  Serious injuries were common.  Deaths occurred, thought not often – not because punches were pulled (they weren’t) but because armoured knights were actually very difficult to kill, and because the object of the game was not to shed blood but to win money (renown came a close second) by ransoming your victim and his gear once you’d defeated him.

Some authorities opposed tournaments (they were banned in England), others encouraged them as a means of keeping men-at-arms trained and battle-ready, and of channelling their aggression away from the wider society.  Their heartland was what is now north-east France, Belgium and the Low Countries, because it was all open and level territory and because, being one of the most populous areas of Europe, it had always teemed with young men ever eager for the martial life.

The sport had died out by the fifteenth century (too violent, too dangerous, too uncivilised), but – are you listening, Vitaly Mutko, Russian minister for sport? – surely it is time for a modern revival, and surely Russia is the place for it?

Russia clearly has plenty of fine, sporting young men who would be proud and willing to revive such traditions. And Russia of all countries has plenty of wide open spaces, uninhabited and far from civilised society, where the tournament could be revived and could thrive. How about the far east, towards its borders with China and South Korea?  Only last month, a new law was passed to give away small plots of land in Russia’s sparsely-populated far east, in an attempt to encourage Russian citizens to settle there.  Stick all your soccer hooligans out there and that’s another problem solved.

Instead of the Rio Olympics and the 2018 World Cup, Russia could inaugurate and host a global Tournament of Tournaments. The whole world could send its thugs, hooligans and gangsters to Russia’s far east.  They could all fight it out there to their hearts content, far away in a distant and forgotten corner of the planet. Start it this summer and it could draw all those violent gangs away from Rio, thus making the Olympics safer for the rest of us.  Host it every four years and it could do the same for the World Cup.  Host it every year, please. Indeed, make it a continual, ongoing tournament, at the risk of putting policemen out of work the world over.

Think of the glory, the honour, the respect this would win Russia in the eyes of the civilised world!  And you know Russia could win it!  How proud Russia could be of her boys!  Even prouder than she is now!

And while Russia’s at it, she could use it as a testing ground and dumping ground for all those incredibly nasty weapons – thermite bombs (incendiaries even hotter than white phosphorous) and thermobaric bombs (the most powerful explosive ever, apart from nuclear bombs) – which Russia’s allegedly been caught out using on Aleppo this week. Such weapons shouldn’t even be used on the world’s worst thugs and gangsters, but I’d rather they were used on them than on innocent civilians in Syria.

Sport and politics?  Different things altogether? Try telling that to the ghost of Ivan Turgenev, whose apparently innocent book “A Sportman’s Sketches” (also known as “A Hunter’s Sketches” or “Sketches from a Hunter’s Album”) had him arrested by the Russian authorities and sent into exile way back in 1852.

I’m sure he wouldn’t have been cheering on the Russian ‘ultras’ in France this summer.

 

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