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Dark side of the sporting life:ONE GROUP sees them as the greatest festivals in the world, another group calls them the "Killing Fields". Aintree and Cheltenham are the capitals of jumps racing and the two Irish favourites on the racing calendar. Cheltenham is the Olympics. The Grand National is Everest. But not every one will risk everything for the glory of winning a Gold Cup, that is, except the horses.

There is a group of critics in Britain that sees Tony McCoy’s emotional win in Liverpool last weekend as the “National Disgrace”. They argue while jump horses were once bred to cope with the robust demands of national hunt racing, the modern industry concentrates on breeding a lighter-boned, speedier animal for flat racing.

They say that the less successful flat racers, or those showing a “Pegasus”-like aptitude for soaring high and clearing fences, are off-loaded for a career in the jumps game. But because they are fine tuned for speed rather than skeletal strength, they risk serious and often fatal injury when they do fall.

They say many of the jumps horses are ballet dancers who fall short of the grace, speed and poise demanded by the exacting Bolshoi School but because of their physical training are consigned to a career in the equine equivalent of cage fighting. At Aintree, if 15 of the 40 starters finish, that’s pretty normal, a “result” even. But the disagreement doesn’t end there.

Critics say the recent carnage at the Cheltenham Festival – where four horse died, the highest total since 2006 when 11 died – illustrates modern jump horses cannot cope with courses that are set up to be deliberately challenging.

The protest group claimed many came from flat racing stock and that Cheltenham is the most lethal course in the country, with 36 dead in 82 days of racing. Aintree, they say, comes a close second. Thirty horses have been killed one way or another over the three-day Grand National meeting since 1997.

Those protests ignore that death and injury have always been an acceptable aspect of some sports. There is no serious complaint when the blinker-eyed, would-be Everest conquerors trudge past fleshless corpses, the fluorescent rags of their clothing identifying the death point, sometimes decades before. Revealing themselves only in severe thaw, even dead they follow the seasons. They are ignored by colleagues whose only impulse is to get to the top and down again.

There is that same bleak acceptance in boxing that understands the blood-splattered shirts of those at ringside, the gobs of red spit, clotted snot and sweat that spray across the television monitors, reporters’ notebooks and shirts are part of the bargain with the game. There is an acceptance that you do as much as you can to stay safe on the mountain, in the ring, or around Aintree, but if it goes wrong, the risks for yourself and the horse have not been taken in ignorance.

More than that there is an understanding the human condition is also at work and that blinded by arrogance and self-regard we over-estimate our sensibilities and misguidedly elevate ourselves to a superior type of human animal that should know better.

It would be a puzzling concept if we were prepared to risk killing ourselves but not other animals. Death may not be an acceptable outcome but it is an outcome that over the decades sport has been able to accommodate. Nearly 180 have died climbing Everest making it the highest graveyard on earth with about 45 still up their frozen casks. There are tent cities of people in Nepal queuing to have a crack at the Goddess Mother of the Snows, Chomolangma.

There are thousands each week in boxing rings causing each other partial brain damage and death. Part of that merry dance is that horses will continue to run and jump and die.

GAA legends at home at Sportsground

ALL THIS talk of Connacht and the European Challenge Cup semi-final against Toulon in the Sportsground later this month.

Rugby it may now be, but it wasn’t always that way. Aside from the dog racing we have been informed the Sportsground was the only hurling field in Galway city until the opening of Pearse Stadium in 1956 and it was there that over 7,000 came to see titanic clashes between Liam Mellows and Castlegar during the 1940s. They say Mellows’ men played their hurling on the streets of Galway, not on any pitch.

The 1942 Galway county hurling final was also played at the Sportsground and won by Liam Mellows but after the match there was an objection to the length of the pitch by the losers, Ardrahan. The pitch was subsequently found to be one foot short of the regulation length and the objection upheld, the final refixed for Loughrea. Liam Mellows won the re-run match but major rows broke out during and after the game.

Then, because of what they believed were disgraceful scenes on the pitch, the county board declared the 1942 championship void and Mellows were never given their medals. Charlie Hughes, the late father of Michael, who has pointed out the storied history of the ground and the local hurling stronghold, played on that Mellows team.

Directly across from the main gate of the Sportsground also lives a legend of the game of hurling, Seán Duggan, now in his mid 80s.

Duggan is one of the most famous goalkeepers in the game as he kept Tony Reddan off the Galway team. Reddan was named as the goalkeeper of the century but because Duggan was immovable he left the county and played with Tipperary.

Paddy “Mogan” Duggan RIP and James Duggan, Seán’s two brothers, also played for the Galway team in the 1953 All-Ireland final. All of them grew up locally on College Road and as kids honed their hurling skills at the Sportsground.

As Michael Hughes rightly points out, if we want to talk about ghosts astride the Sportsground in Galway city then look no further than many of the giants of the game of hurling.

Hitman Hearns floored by the tax man

RAY “BOOM Boom” Mancini never suffered from financial anxiety, but he could, as a professional boxer, be considered unlucky.

In 1982, Mancini was embroiled in a fight that would change his life forever.

In the ring with him was South Korean scrapper Duk Koo Kim, who was about to fight the last 14 rounds of his life. In the final act of the bout Kim collapsed in the ring never to recover. Four days later he was dead.

The fallout from that episode was startling. Richard Green, the referee for the fight, later committed suicide, while Kim’s mother killed herself from the grief of losing her son.

No, boxing has never been easy and although Mancini walked away from the ring with most of his €10 million prize money, the sport has a regular habit of coughing up its champions threadbare and destitute.

Heavyweight champion Joe Lewis spent his later days working as a glorified doorman at a Las Vegas gaming house, while Jack “The Gorgeous Gael” Doyle was declared bankrupt twice and fell into alcoholism.

More recently what the bottle might have done to fighters in the past, the Inland Revenue Service is now doing to living legends.

He won €40 million over a career that spanned from 1977 to his last fight in 2006, but the Kronk’s favourite son, Thomas “Hitman” Hearns, an eight-time World Champion is the latest to be down on his luck.

Hearns recently auctioned off as much of his memorabilia as he could.

His boxing robes, jackets, boots, shorts and even his ’57 Chevy Bel Air and 47-foot 1993 Fountain sport boat went under the hammer as the former fighter struggled to meet an IRS bill of €450,000.

He held WBA, WBC, WBU and IBO titles between 1980 and 1999 and his three-round loss to Marvin Hagler for the middleweight title in 1985 is considered one of the best bouts in history.

Hearns broke his hand in the first round of that bout before Hagler won.

It was the golden age for middleweights but blowing €40 million on, as Hearns puts it, “‘family and friends” seems excessive.

Then again, boxing is just that.

FINAL STRAW

Semenya has right to better treatment

THE OINKS in Athletics South Africa (ASA) now look as ridiculous as the late Eugene Terre Blance did when he rode on his white horse and declared his thinning hair, pot belly and white skin racially superior. But the ASA can’t help itself since its cack-handed fumbling of the Caster Semenya case. The 800 metres champion will not qualify for the South African team for the Africa Athletics Championships because the qualification mark she made last year has been changed.

She will not have the results of a gender test until June and has not competed since the World Championships in Berlin last August. It’s another kindergarden solution to an ASA problem, all of their own making.

Semenya has brought in the lawyers. Sensing a problem prior to Berlin (there are stinky suggestions that gender tests were conducted in Pretoria before last August), Semenya could have been spared the humiliation if the ASA had not ignored doctors’ advise and withdrew the athlete from the Berlin event until her gender issue was privately resolved. Semenya will probably be classified as having what endocrinologists see as a common sex variation, which means she may have internal testes instead of ovaries. Apart from infringing her human right to dignity, the ASA have also made her a bullseye for bigots.

Sorensen's injury proves costly

THE GLAMOUR life of a tennis professional!

Louk Sorensen’s breakthrough this year at the Australian Open could have been misconstrued for lasting success and big bucks on the dog-eat-dog ATP tour.

But following his second-round exit in Melbourne Sorensen picked up an in jury that kept him out of Ireland’s Davis Cup side and has seriously hampered his earning power and ability to climb up the rankings to that magical point at around 100 where he would gain automatic entry into the biggest events including the majors.

Since the Australian Open the top-ranked Irishman played in Heilbronn, Germany, where he lost to Swiss player Staphanie Bohli in the first round. Bohli’s ATP ranking is unlisted. Sorensen won €885. In February he lost in the first round to the 468th-ranked player in the world, Evgeny Donstoy, in a tournament in Kazan, Russia, and earned €520.

Since taking €31,500 Aussie dollars from the first Slam of the year, the 223rd-ranked Sorensen has played twice and, as of last Monday, earned less than €2,000. His Davis Cup colleague, Conor Niland, has been busier and, ranked 226th, recently qualified for a big ATP event in Houstan Texas. His earnings touch €22,325 for the year to date. That’s glamour.