The Leisure Review: La Flamme Rouge

La Flamme Rouge edition 2; dateline 10 March 2014

Football, that ever-generous gift horse
While some observers of the beautiful game wonder what has become of a sport in which Alan Pardew’s half-hearted and poorly executed attempt to remonstrate with an opposition player could be deemed a head-butt, we at LFR take a more academic approach, relishing the cerebral and searching out the nuanced intellectual plane. Thus we were delighted to find Ellis Cashmore, professor of culture, media and sport at Staffordshire University, on BBC 5Live to offer his views on the damage that elite sport can be seen to be doing to our young people. His argument was that we have lost sight of sport as a pleasurable pursuit, that we have been taken in by elite sport such as the Premier League and its unrealistic promises of wealth and glory. Parents are encouraging their children to become dreamers, he suggested, given that it is statistically highly unlikely that they will join such rarefied circles of wealth and celebrity. Sadly, the rolling news agenda of international affairs and Premier League gossip had squeezed Professor Cashmore right up against the news and any further challenging of the hegemony of sporting elites was swiftly curtailed.

First Wood Green…
Farewell then, BBC3. You made comedy your aim but kept Two Pints of Lager running for far too long and cancelled Pulling far too quickly. You will therefore not be much missed by many. LFR recalls the early days of the digital rollout and wondering whether the BBC would use the technology and their reach to launch a sports channel, offering viewer numbers as a counterbalance to huge rights payments. How sports participation could have been boosted by someone within the BBC hierarchy understanding sport; but (and we have it on reliable authority) there was none. LFR also remembers writing to the DG to urge them to pick up the rights to the Tour de France when Channel 4 dropped it like an ankle-high slip catch in favour of their short-lived flirtation with Test cricket. Ned Boulting, ITV4’s microphone wielder during La Grande Boucle has revealed that at the time the Tour package could have been had for next to nothing. Imagine how big the audience could be if the Tour was on the BBC, we urged. With ITV4 now dragging in a million a night during July – and we don’t get to say this very often – how right we were.

Move along now: nothing to see here
With the discovery that so much of sporting excellence depends upon leadership and learning, La Flamme Rouge was delighted to see the enquiry into extensive horse doping within the Godolphin stable demonstrating both these important traits. Leadership was supplied by Sheikh Mohammed in Rashid al-Maktoum, the UK’s most celebrated and successful racehorse owner and owner of Godolphin, who quickly to get to the bottom of the highly damaging scandal. It was also clear that Sheikh Mohammed had learned the lessons of other sports organisations seeking to make sure that everything is above board in their own stables. However, seeing that the Sheikh employed Lord Stevens, former head of the Metropolitan police, to undertake the enquiry with no thought to potential conflict of interest or the Met’s track record of openness and honesty, the model of rectitude seems to have been the Union Cycliste Internationale. No one seems to have been surprised that Lord Stevens, paid by Sheikh Mohammed to investigate wrong-doing in Sheikh Mohammed’s organisation that had brought huge financial reward to Sheikh Mohammed and report to Sheikh Mohammed on his findings, found Sheikh Mohammed to be entirely free of any association with the systematic doping operation carried out in the organisation headed by Sheikh Mohammed. However, the Swiss Equestrian Federation has questioned the validity of the findings. La Flamme Rouge looks forward to Sheikh Mohammed sending Pat McQuaid to Switzerland to find out why someone should want to spit in the soup and damage such a fine, upstanding sport that horseracing has been found to be.

Judgement pending, coinage ready
Amid all the positive press for the opening of London’s latest Olympic pool to the public, there was much talk of the London Aquatic Centre as the architectural jewel of the newly remodelled Olympic Park. Having not yet made our visit to inspect the facility, we will have to withhold judgement for the moment but it will have to be pretty impressive to match the elegant lines of the velodrome. Marks will be awarded to Zaha Hadid against all the usual design criteria with a weighted score for how long it takes us to find a locker that works.

From Manchester to Paris via Ilkeston to secure the entente cordiale
And talking of the velodrome, the performance of Britain’s cyclists during the recent world track championships has raised a few ripples of concern among those who had come to take British dominance of the boards as a default position. The men came home without a medal to show for their efforts, although the women had a better time of it, delivering two golds among their five medals. While debate continues over the ability of Dave Brailsford to have a foot on the diverging boats that are British Cycling’s professional road team and British Cycling’s track-based programme, at LFR we put our faith in the Sage of Ilkeston’s previous observation that “it’s called peaking for a reason”. However, it does seem clear that one of the many achievements that British Cycling can add to the long list of feathers in its cap is the raising of standards within international track cycling. Everyone else has undoubtedly worked hard to catch up and we will be writing to Sir Dave to urge him to take on the next task that the cycling world is yearning for: a French winner of the Tour de France.

Taking it all back home
In Westminster the political elite are leaving no stone unturned in their fight to keep Scotland tied to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The latest stroke saw Maria Miller announce that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be allowed to watch the BBC. With this debate taking such surreal turns every day, we look forward to the continuing discussion with glee. Our prediction is that someone north of the border will point out that John Logie Baird was a Scot and therefore an independent Scotland would waste no time telling England, never mind the BBC, you can’t have telly. The counter-argument, we presume, would then involve Ms Miller taking time out of her busy schedule [qv TLR features passim] to point out that Mr Baird developed the technology in London. Bar Italia in London’s Soho, which occupies the building in which Baird gave the first demonstration of television equipment, would then claim television for Italy, leaving the Dutch, a nation brought up to believe in the sanctity of the BBC, if only as purveyor of ’Allo ’Allo, wondering what all the fuss is about.

Taking it all elsewhere
Uproar in the Piraeus as the Greek government decides that it may well be time that the legendarily secretive and mythically wealthy Greek shipping magnates should be brought within the reach of the tax authorities. Not since the cry of ‘Here come the Spartans’ have worry beads been seen to revolve so quickly as the denizens of Athens’ historic port ponder the implications of having to give up the preferential status granted to shipowners as part of the Greek constitution drawn up after the second world war. With a predictability that will come as a comfort to anyone studying modern business ethics, the Union of Greek Shipowners has threatened to take its ships elsewhere. Having repeatedly issued a similar threat, the UK banking industry could perhaps let them know where it is they plan to go when they finally have their bluff called by an ungrateful British public.

The selective power of the beautiful game
Fifa’s abrogation of any responsibility for the impact of its own greed seems to have been completed with a statement that the world’s governing body for football could do little to improve working conditions for the migrant workers in Qatar who are fulfilling the contractual obligations of the host nation to deliver the 2022 World Cup. Speaking to a European parliament hearing on the subject, Germany’s representative on the Fifa executive, Theo Zwanzinger, admitted that working conditions were “absolutely unacceptable” but that Fifa would not be taking any action. “What do you expect of a football organisation?” he said. Others may be musing on an apparent contradiction: on one had Fifa has the ability to impose stringent local laws on host nations to ensure that Fifa’s commercial revenues are not threatened by local competition and remain free of any local taxation; on the other, Fifa has no influence on how many people die in the process of building its pleasure domes.

The selective power of a beautiful brand
Adidas has an enviable track record as one of the world’s biggest sportswear brands and as one of Fifa’s biggest commercial collaborators but the German-based company will have a hard time explaining its latest decision to Herr Blatter. A number of T-shirt designs launched to promote and celebrate the forthcoming World Cup in Brazil feature what some people thought to be rather inappropriate references to Brazilian women. Agreeing that the T-shirts were a bit too close to promoting sexual tourism than might be desirable, Adidas has removed them for sale. Now someone from the company has the job of trying to explain to Fifa why a business decision might be based on ethical considerations rather than money. We don’t envy them the task.

Quality versus quantity: art versus income
Top Gear’s attempt to wave a red rag to the easily goaded bull that is the cycle lobby [qv the iPlayer for Sunday 2 March] was as predictable as it was ill-judged but it did at least serve to demonstrate a rather more telling truth about the relationship between commercial success and the quality of artistic output. The item was presented as May and Clarkson’s attempt to create a public information film to promote cycling safety and, predictably enough, their chosen message was that cyclists should simply leave the roads free for motor vehicles to go about their business. It was another indication that Top Gear, one of the BBC’s most successful brands, has become a jaded vehicle for the amusement of its presenters. For some time now the show has delivered a well-practised format of automotive exotica, celebrity appearances, travelogues and a bootful of hackneyed in-jokes, displaying the tiredness of thought and expression that eventually comes to even the best of shows. However, the income generated from international sales of the Top Gear brand is of such a magnitude that there is little prospect of anyone at the BBC suggesting that the self-indulgent gurning of reactionary, wealthy middle-aged men enjoying themselves is wearing a little thin. More of the same is the only option.

Audience development at the point of a gun
Innovation aplenty at the Copenhagen zoo where a young giraffe was deemed surplus to requirements because of the restrictions imposed by an international agreement to prevent inbreeding among animals in captivity. Having declined to entertain the offers to take the animal from other zoos around Europe, the Danes gave the giraffe the bullet – they literally gave the giraffe the bullet – before staging a public dissection and feeding the choice cuts to the zoo’s carnivores. There was a range of views expressed by animal protection organisations, many of whom questioned the zoo’s ethical stance on animal welfare, but one thing will not have escaped the attention of zoo managers around the world: a dead giraffe didn’t half draw a crowd.

George and the marbles, part 1
As part of the promotional duties for his latest film, The Monuments Men, George Clooney was asked whether he thought the Parthenon marbles, better known to older UK audiences as the Elgin marbles, should be repatriated. George suggested that “maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing if they were returned”, adding, “That would be a very fair and a very nice thing. I think it is the right thing to do.” In line with official Leisure Review editorial policy that states “this is George Clooney’s world and our behaviour should reflect the fact that we are all here as guests”, LFR is obliged to point out that this is one of the most measured and sensible contributions to the argument heard in the last two decades.

George and the marbles, part 2
But this did not prevent Boris Johnson wading into the debate with his own unique mixture of intellectual affectation and expensively cultivated stupidity. London’s elected mayor couldn’t resist the obvious joke that Clooney had clearly lost his own marbles but followed this with the suggestion that the actor was advocating a “Hitlerian agenda for London’s cultural treasures”. Clooney’s response served to remind a jaded British public what class actually looks like and also highlight just how much money is wasted on private education in the UK every year. “I’m a great fan of the mayor,” Clooney said, “and I’m sure my right honourable friend had no real intention of comparing me to Hitler. I’d chalk it up to a little too much hyperbole washed down with a few whiskies. I’ve found myself in the same spot a time for two so I hold no ill will.”

The Winter Olympics: coming to a beach near you
Anyone who remembers the mud-flinging that accompanied the expansion of the London 2012 budget towards £10 billion may be wondering how anyone might manage to spend three and half times that amount on a winter version of the Olympic jamboree, particularly as the snow- and ice-based affair is a considerably smaller undertaking and in the shape of facilities shouldn’t need much more than some shovels and manpower to shift the white stuff into the appropriate shapes. The answer seems to involve the decision to host the winter Games in a beach resort not noted for its snowfall, requiring the movement of everyone and everything either into hugely expensive buildings or to the mountains several hours’ journey away. In addition, should allegations that the disappearance of what by some estimates equates to around two thirds of the total budget into secret personal accounts in sunny tax havens prove true the auditors will be forced to conclude that this will not have helped the bottom line. With temperatures rising as high as 11 degrees and no many days of sub-zero temperatures during the Games, competitors with less than complementary comments about facilities were not hard to find. “Very shit,” as one Australian boarder described conditions, seemed to about sum it up.

Money talks: waiting for the whisper
Could a new wind of tolerance be about to blow through the musty corridors of professional sport? Emboldened by the positive reaction Tom Daley received when he went public with his same-sex relationship, Casey Stoneham, captain of the England women’s football team, spoke to the press about being gay. Meanwhile, Michael Sam, a star of US college football, prepared for the National Football League draft pick by explaining that he was prepared for the exposure that would come with being the first openly gay player in NFL history. Reactions to Stoneham’s coming out were overwhelmingly positive and Sams received support from some very high-profile individuals, including Michelle Obama, before unnamed sources within the professional gridiron locker rooms began to explain how Sams’ value would drop because his presence would adversely affect the atmosphere within a team environment. The English Premier League has largely kept its own counsel, presumably to brainstorm acceptable reactions to any gay player in professional football that might decide to come out. As soon as someone in the Premier League marketing department has worked out how to make money out of such a situation, everyone will relax.

Au revoir to a noted venue
And finally, sad to report the closure of Lupo (the sign said LVPO, which could confuse a non-latin speaker), the bar-stroke-restaurant-stroke-typo in London’s Soho that was the venue of one of the inaugural social events for the then-unchartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity. The blue plaque that marks this momentous occasion in the sports institute’s history was hidden behind some scaffolding board as we passed along Dean Street but we are assured that the venue’s demise does not constitute an omen for organisations that may have frequented it. In contrast LFR is pleased to be able to report that the French House, site of many Leisure Review social gatherings over the years, is just next door and remains steadfastly open. Ask for a pint and tell them you’re a mate of Miles Templeman.

Mrs Smith