Ban it!

There are some sports whose enthusiasts are not mostly involved in organising brawls or trashing entire districts. You sometimes hear of sportspeople whose burning ambition is not just to win lucrative advertising contracts but also to achieve mastery in things, other than tax evasion. My brother-in-law even claims that he attended a match in which the result hadn’t been fixed in advance many weeks before. But my brother-in-law is a mythomaniac, and besides it was a dodge ball game played by nursery school children. Meanwhile the media (the credible sort) regularly publish reports about criminals (who are misleadingly called coaches or referees) who have decided who plays, who wins and who makes decent money over a glass of whisky. So why spend billions on maintaining this pathetic façade? Perhaps for a young Israeli or Palestinian to be able to meet on the same pitch in a FIFA advertising extravaganza? Football seems to be the most tarnished of all sports, but it is by no means exceptional in this regard. Professional cycling is another fierce contender for this dubious accolade, as its (so-called) physios have already used all the elements from the periodic table to make their compounds, while the best nanotechnologists in the world have made a fortune from equipping bikes with devices that discreetly support the work of muscles. Cycling is closely followed in the contest for this crown by weightlifting, whose contestants compete with different emblems on their chests, different chemicals in their blood every season and then the list of Olympic medallists needs to be updated every few years as better and better testing makes each old list “obsolete”. And then there’s boxing...

But each world beating sportsperson started out on their careers by learning to juggle an under-inflated ball in the backyard, or by performing daring slaloms between dustbins on rusty old bikes, or with attempts to open sliding doors in trains or possibly by raining blows upon the faces of some of the more timid railway passengers. Then just one question arises: where did it all go wrong? However, there are some disciplines where the winners really are the best and where artificial means haven’t been used to enhance their results. Skeet shooting, sepak takraw (kick volleyball)... and that’s about it. I’m sure this is the case with skeet shooting, as I have some personal experience. I tried to play once using a popular substance (a legal one!) and was thrashed even more comprehensively than usual. I learnt a lesson I would never forget and so I have not combined the two things ever since.

But let’s go back to the concept of banning. It is unfortunately quite possible that – as happened with prohibition – such a ban would be counter-productive and merely result in the increased popularity of the sports that had been driven underground. Perhaps not in Scandinavia, where all boxing rings could be replaced with displays of upholstered designer furniture without anyone raising an eyebrow… but in Poland? I have the feeling bordering on certainty that illegal back-street matches would be taking place and the teams would be promoted or relegated from one secret league to another. Construction companies would enter secret tenders for the construction of partially submerged velodromes disguised as sewage treatment plants or for football stadiums that were described as “dog parks” in the tender specifications. And in the meantime, student bars would be populated by trendy young radicals wearing ball-shaped badges bearing the slogan: ‘Legalise it!’ So maybe I’ll just have to content myself with having the beautiful dream of banning the physically and morally corrupting, anti-social menace of sport, instead.