Sports Review: Goodbyes, tears and filthy lucre

It was the winter of the $50 billion Olympic Games, the spring of Brian O’Driscoll’s long goodbye, the summer of Brazil’s humbling and yet again an autumn when fires burnt brightest in Kilkenny and Kerry.

The idea of the "end" of the sporting year is misleading. Nothing stops: if anything, the various leagues and associations around the world take advantage of the idea of millions of western-world families binging on chocolate and bleary with wine and tired of watching Harry Potter for the millionth time by ramping up their coverage.

English soccer, rugby union, horse racing, the NBA and NFL all have frantically busy Christmas season schedules which means that there is never a shortfall, never a blackout on television coverage of the games. The calendar changes and the great story – athletes and teams winning and losing stuff, getting richer, getting older and, in the stock phrase, “putting their bodies on the line” for mass entertainment and fascination – roars on. But the events of the last 12 months will come to define the year for future generations and identify 2014 as the year when the sun fell out of the Brazilian sky.

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For long after the Germans had swept away the bunting in Berlin and finished lauding their World Cup winning team and returned to work, millions of Brazilians must have continued to turn the events of the night of July 8th over and over in their minds. What had happened to their team in Belo Horizonte? In the aftermath, it was hard to decipher which was the greater indignation: the final score line of 7-1 in a semi-final or those phantasmagorical six minutes in which the Germans scored four goals (Klose 23’, Kroos 24’,26’, Khedira 29’) and swiftly erased any lingering illusion that Brazil had the copyright on the beautiful game.

It didn’t matter that this particular version of Brazil had been dour and dogged, almost a betrayal in approach and imagination to their predecessors or that Neymar, the only real star in an underwhelming outfit had to sit out that semi-final because of a reckless challenge by Columbia’s Juan Zuniga. Even after all of Brazil’s limitations were taken into account, this was inexplicable: it was a national psychic meltdown in front of a world television audience. Because any pretence of contest was removed so early in the evening, the match was catapulted into a darker realm.

For the Brazilians in the crowd of 58,141 and the millions watching around the country, the semi-final was must have seemed like some otherworldly revenge on their country. However, global audience was torn between sympathy and fascination at the thought of what the German team might do to the shambolic host team during the remainder of the game. At 0-5 with a full hour of football still to play, Brazil looked to be facing a double-figure loss. As a football nation, Brazil seemed light years rather than mere decades removed from its peerless, romanticised class of 1970.

Football’s trusted allegory – the boy genius emerging from the favelas as saviour – looked spent and outdated. This was the perfect storm: a clumsy, unexceptional team weighed down by unbearable national expectation encountering the end result of a progressive and moneyed German coaching programme on a night when its best young stars clicked. One side froze. The other was free as a bird. Afterwards, the old stereotypes about Germany – the ruthlessness, the icy temperament, the technical mastery – were trotted out but rarely did a German team play with such joy in the World Cup.

And they managed the delicate trick of not disrespecting the hosts even as they made them look comically inferior: there was none of the showboating of Andreas Müller in 1996 or the objectionable supremacy of Harald Schumacher circa 1982. And in a strange way, the Germans saved Brazil from an equally bleak conclusion to their World Cup by beating Argentina in the final. There is every chance, had the Brazilians somehow fluked their way into that final that they would have lost to Argentina, a fate arguably worse than the humiliation they were forced to witness in Belo Horizonte.

Either outcome marked an unhappy last chapter to Brazil’s entrance to the top table of sport.

Blackest joke

The 2014 World Cup had as its preamble endless stories about a mutinous public tired of the poverty, the corruption and, finally, the insane cost of hosting the thing. Yet again it demanded the questions: what is it about the vanity of governments that foists major sports events upon its people? The blackest joke about Sochi, venue for Russia’s Winter Olympics was, in fact, white: there was no snow in the clement seaside resort where Uncle Joe Stalin used to dip his toes. So they had to truck the stuff in. And snow was not the only curiosity about Sochi.

On the eve of the games, the town’s mayor confidently assured a BBC reporter that there are “no gays in Sochi”, a city of 340,000 people. The comment helped to ensure that the Sochi games became a litmus test for gay rights. Outside terror threats; official Russia’s appalling attitude towards gay rights; environmental scandals and the sheer cost – $50 billion (€37 billion), more than all previous winter Olympics combined– meant that the build-up to the games generated more attention than the actual event.

As the year went on, the spotlight fell on Fifa's decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Of the 2.3 million people living in the city, an estimated 88 per cent are migrant workers earning negligible wages and working in dangerous, repressive conditions. A BBC Panorama investigation aired in early December made the claim that 10 per cent of the workers' deaths are from suicide. Some of those are involved in constructing the stadiums where the world's best teams and supporters will play in eight years' time.

In November, Michael Garcia, the American lawyer who headed Fifa’s investigation into bribery during the bidding process won by Qatar, made it known that the 44-page version released by Fifa was a sham: a white-washed version of events which exonerated key players and ignored specific criticisms of Sepp Blatter, Fifa’s long-standing figurehead. The condemnation was general but Fifa did as Fifa does and remained above the fray until the hubbub died down and the focus returned to the games it administrates. And the qualifying teams – including Ireland, if we get there – will travel to Qatar when the time comes. There will be no conscientious objection, no significant voice to say that a football competition just isn’t worth it the misery and death currently being inflicted on impoverished workers.

And anyway, there was so just much football to distract us from uncomfortable truths.

In 2014, Luis Suarez came as close as a footballer ever has done to winning a league title single-handedly. During the World Cup, he would briefly become the most notorious figure in world sport when he bit Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini, an act of lunacy which, in a roundabout way, confirmed his departure from Liverpool to Barcelona. That £80-million transfer fee reflected the fact that the elite players are fast becoming the preserve of a handful of clubs.

Suarez, for all his vision, failed to see that in Barca, he was merely another world-class player: had he stayed at Liverpool, he would have owned a city and might have reinvigorated an ailing dynasty: he might have set himself apart.

Up the M62, Manchester United collapsed without Alex Ferguson’s vise-like grip of authority and command. The chief victim was his chosen successor David Moyes, sacked in April towards the conclusion of a season when the team seemed to stumble from one calamity to another without ever catching a break. The treatment of Moyes was the most humiliating proof that in sport, contracts now mean nothing: the six years given to the Scotsman was merely notional. He was chewed up.

On May 19th, Louis van Gaal was appointed and his chosen assistant manager, Ryan Giggs, announced his retirement after 672 appearances over 24 years with United and some 28 years after Ferguson’s unforgettable first sighting of him at the Cliff: “he looked as relaxed and natural on the park as a dog chasing a piece of silver paper in the wind.”

Streak of emerald

The Welsh man was not the only one bowing out. It was Brian O’Driscoll’s last year as a rugby player and it ended where, in essence, it had begun: Paris, the city in which first announced himself to the world as a streak of emerald concocting three tries from nowhere. O’Driscoll’s progress ran parallel with that of rugby as product, pastime and source of national pride and as he admitted before his final match in Dublin, he had been forced to do his growing up, sometimes awkwardly, in public. By his final season, he had become a de facto statesman without ever losing the combination of ferocious bravery and his genius for the unexpected which enabled him to score so many delightful, unique tries. Imagine how good he could have been if hadn’t played most of his career as blind as a bat.

In rugby, the players are getting bigger and faster and therefore the hits more punishing. In American football, decades of negligible medical care and the consequences of playing hurt has led to a stream of sad tales and class actions from the stars of the 1970s and 1980s. Uncomfortable stories of brain damage, of altered personalities and destitution are no longer pinned on just boxing. But the question is becoming louder: at what stage do the full-on contact sports become unsafe for their practitioners?

Sports science has transformed physiques across the board: even golf, for decades the last bastion for the gourmands now produces athletes who look like athletes. Rory McIlroy, for instance, has reshaped himself. He remains the most mercurial of individual talents, turning it on for long enough to claim the British Open and the USPGA this summer. As Tiger Woods’ power declines, golf is revolving around the potential and star power of the Ulster man.

It has been a fast journey, from cherub chipping golf-balls into a washing tub on Gerry Kelly’s Friday night television show to the leading figure in world golf. But it is still easy to see in McIlroy the precocious talent who was obsessed with the game for the sake of the game, years before it brought him wealth and fame and endorsements.

Fascinate the public

And isn’t that the reason that sport continues to fascinate the public: that when you look beyond the saturated advertising pitches and the increasingly scandalous ticket prices for major events and the agents and the cynicism, the actual event – the race, the game, the shot, holds the power to amaze?

Everyone has their own list of sporting memories from 2014. It might have been Aidan O’Brien’s Australia galloping clear in the final furlong of the Epsom Derby. It might have been Katie Taylor’s continuing domination at the world boxing championships in South Korea or Roger Federer’s extraordinary duel with the gradual diminishment of his omnipotence and Novak Djokovic in a five-set, classic final at Wimbledon.

It might have been the Kilkenny hurlers, in their latest guise of invincibility. It might have been the flawless synchronicity of the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. Or the Kerry footballers, supposedly the beaten docket of this year’s All-Ireland football championship but, by September, offering proof that you can fool all of the people all of the time.

December is the month for black-tie awards ceremonies and television highlights shows, with slow-motion pictures and evocative music and we will sit back amazed that so many stories, so much brilliance and cynicism and winning and losing could have been crammed into one calendar year. And when they return to that night in Brazil, it is the faces of the fans that they will show rather the players: the shock, the profound disappointment and the acceptance that a force they had believed to be magical – their national football team – simply wasn’t so anymore. At least it had the good grace to rain hard in Rio on the night afterwards, when the mourning began.