UK Edition
On the morning that Britain voted to leave the European Union, I was in Paris covering Euro 2016, and quite honestly football was the last thing on my mind. I walked the streets of Oberkampf and Le Marais listlessly and without purpose, trying and failing to organise my thoughts, engulfed in a quiet, private devastation.
As the repercussions began to jolt into motion, as politicians sank without trace, as markets and currencies collapsed, I feverishly weighed up my options: claim political asylum and refuse to leave my Rive Gauche hotel room, or return to Britain with the €50 in my wallet and use it to buy a house in Mayfair.
You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve calmed down a bit since then. And yet in the intervening weeks, as the political crises and economic quandaries and human tragedies have piled upon each other like toppings on a grotesque global pizza, something strange has happened to my relationship with sport.
One of the things people notice when they go to a football match for the first time is how utterly furious everybody seems. And for those of us immersed in sport, perhaps we fail to notice the degree to which anger is our default mode of processing it.
But in a world quite literally falling to pieces, at what point does such anger become irresponsible? When people are getting mown down in public and an actual breathing moron is on the verge of becoming the American president, is it still justifiable to blow your lid about Alastair Cook failing to enforce to follow-on?
Obviously, I can’t answer that question for you. But personally, I began to notice a subtle shift. When golfers started withdrawing en masse from the Olympics, I felt something more closely approximating sympathy than the primal outrage that characterised much of the subsequent coverage.
I failed to summon the slightest scintilla of scorn for the antics of Nick Kyrgios at Wimbledon. I even thought the Euro 2016 final was a decent spectacle, as opposed the eye-gouging, self-immolating monstrosity most people deemed it.
This was no retreat into apathy. In fact, it was the opposite: a subconscious resolution to feel something positive again, in the face of all available evidence. I watched Andy Murray – a man I have probably sworn at more than at any other living human – lifting the Wimbledon trophy. I gave quiet thanks to the parents of Chris Woakes. I went to the Olympic Stadium on Friday night as a paying punter, roared home Usain Bolt and Laura Muir, and returned home wondering why the media only bothers to take notice of athletics when it is in crisis.
Believing in the edifying power of sport is not to be blind to its flaws or injustices, but simply to place them in context. The decision to allow Russia to compete in the Olympic Games may be perverse and reprehensible, but I refuse to get angry about it. I refuse to maintain the pretence that sport is the same as real life, even if others are still happy to do so.
On Tuesday morning I put on Sky Sports News, to find that the death of jockey JT McNamara was their second top story, just behind the news that Sky had secured exclusive rights to broadcast the Chinese Super League.
You might be tempted to read all this as a tale about falling out of love with sport. Nothing could be further from the truth. As events bring the planet to a rolling boil, sport has never been more vital.
The unifying potential of an event like the Olympics has never been more necessary. Perhaps in a weird way, our twisted world may even help us to reclaim sport for its original purpose: to redeem and to revive, to enlighten and to enliven, to make us believe in the impossible.
Is it really worth getting so angry about sport?