Toto’s Red Bull-record dismissal fools no-one

Pic by Web Summit

Toto Wolff is fast becoming the poster boy for the adage that if you want to know the true measure of a person, watch how they deal with the bad times rather than the good.

The Mercedes F1 team principal was a smooth, poised pitlane operator while his team was winning seven straight driver championships and eight consecutive constructor titles.

But since Max Verstappen burst that bubble in Abu Dhabi two years ago, the wheels have come off Wolff’s composure more than once.

This one, I think, we can all forgive him…

But then there was the woefully mistimed hubris ahead of the team’s one-win 2022 season…

Followed by the change-your-*******-car slap-down from the new sheriff in town.

And now there’s this. Offered the chance to make polite noises over Max Verstappen’s new consecutive-victories record last Sunday, Wolff’s dignity instead took a hard left into the crash barrier.

How graceless. How charmless. Ron Dennis could be hard-nosed but I think even the former McLaren chief would have done better than this.

Sadly, I have no doubt that were the boot on the other foot, Red Bull principal Christian Horner would have demonstrated pretty much the same childish nonchalance.

And would have fooled pretty much the same number of people.

It’s an irony of Formula One that while the sport relentlessly moulds materials and technology in its pursuit of perfection, human frailty rattles on unchecked like a 1970s Ford Escort.

It takes more than a wind tunnel to sort that out.

Professional golf learns the lesson of ancient Rome – let barbarians in and the empire crumbles

In just a matter of days, my household has seen quite the transformation.

Younger Son, a mad-keen golfer, has been greatly tickled by my view that the Ryder Cup is the most embarrassing freak-show in professional sport.

Embarrassing because of the mountainous fall from grace that this biennial ‘handbags’ squabble has come to represent.

The Ryder Cup is now golf’s version of a week in Magaluf. People with respectable jobs put all that on hold for seven days while setting new personal bests in the kind of behaviour they wouldn’t want their grandmothers to see.

We’ve heard the visiting European team booed to high heaven at Whistling Straits; we’ve seen caddies grab their 15 minutes of fame in the mandatory ‘Ryder Cup-themed petulant spat’ and we have watched Brooks Koepka and some tuppeny journeyman called Daniel Berger swearing at rules officials and making no attempt to hide it.

All the while whooped on by the kind of spectators who now have this sport in their grip like a severe case of poison ivy. If you haven’t picked up on the growing trend of unsavoury interaction between professional golfers and their public, you haven’t been paying attention.

In years gone by, of course, we could console ourselves with the thought that all this guff stops when the cup is handed to the winning captain, and professional golf rediscovers its sanity for another two years.

I’m not sure we have that luxury any more. The Ryder Cup is no longer an aberration. It is now the norm in what is a looming perfect storm at the apex of the sport.

On one side of the ropes, you have increasingly unprepossessing young golfers with all the talent in the world and barely a personality between them. On the other side, a weekly convention of village idiots, lured in not so much by golf as by the irresistible cocktail of beer and television cameras.

(And please don’t tell me “Yes, but that’s just Americans.” To do so ignores one of the biggest cultural cliches of the last 50 years. What starts in America ends up over here. If you’re in the habit of saying “snuck”, you prove my point.)

And presiding over it all, yet another set of blinkered sporting administrators whose only criterion of a job well done is how much money they raise.

I doubt Koepka and Berger will receive so much as a stern glance for their behaviour from the game’s would-be custodians. Why should they? Those same custodians have sat back and done nothing while ball and club technology reduce even the best golf courses on the planet to an irrelevance. On their watch, what should be an even contest between man and terrain has become Tyson Fury vs Mary Berry.

Those same custodians apparently have no problem with spectators bellowing routine inanities when players tee off. “GET IN THE HOLE!!!!!” on a par five being the least ridiculous of them.

Those same custodians somehow convinced themselves that nothing screams “classy” quite like something called the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Although given the s***-show that professional golf is fast becoming, maybe they deserve some credit for foresight.

Koepka’s outburst at rules officials is the most ominous portent. No-one’s under any illusions that professional golfers converse like choirboys when things aren’t going their way but until recently, they have at least kept it down, mindful that it’s one of the niceties that their sport demands.

Don’t be surprised if that’s gone now. The brat Koepka’s entitlement trumped all last Saturday and many of his peers will take their cue from that.

Golf, though, needs to remain a cut above other sports when it comes to the way its competitors conduct themselves, even under the fiercest pressure.

It doesn’t have the immediate visual drama of football – whatever the code – with which to sell itself. Being able to watch grown men and women play it without feeling embarrassed for them the way you so often do in a football stadium; that was one of its compensations.

It could be played good and hard by its finest exponents; there might be meaningul glares aplenty and little love lost out there on the links, but they all knew there was a standard to be observed and heaven help anyone who decided it was optional.

Let other games go to hell in the proverbial handcart; there was always golf to remind you that civilisation is still out there somewhere. At the amateur level nowadays, people from all walks of life play it for that very reason.

If, in its shop window, however, golf becomes just another sport, I believe it has some hard days ahead in the marketplace.

Younger Son is 22. The target demographic. Bullish and worldly, he also likes nothing more than sending up his father’s ‘old-fashioned values’. So I was as much surprised as saddened when he announced that he, too, on reflection, has probably observed his last Ryder Cup.

“I’m actually pleased Arnold Palmer’s dead,” he told me. “The thought of him having to watch that crap…”

Sport and mental health: the truth is somewhere in the middle

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Those whose idea of ‘commentary’ oscillates between calling someone “a legend” or “worse than Hitler”, based solely on whether his opinion tallies with theirs, should click away now.

I come from an era where ‘nuance’ is not merely the name of a nightclub, however, and where black and white are frequently separated by numerous shades of grey.

So I’m not steaming in with Piers Morgan over Simone Biles’ withdrawal from the Olympic gymnastics team event, but nor am I holding hands and tossing bouquets with those on the more gentle side of the debate.

Because if there’s one thing you eventually pick up on if you live life long enough, it’s that for all the hot air expended at opposite ends of an argument, the truth often resides somewhere in the middle.

I follow neither gymnastics nor women’s tennis, so when Ms. Biles removes herself from competition, as Naomi Osaka did from the French tennis Open two months ago — both citing mental health reasons — I would be entering the realms of pure speculation were I to take their decisions at anything other than face value.

I find it hard to believe that Osaka would walk lightly away from a solid shot at landing one of her sport’s marquee events, and while I wasn’t overly sold on Biles’ body language when she explained her withdrawal, I do understand that troubled people are often masters at hiding the fact.

This post is not about them. It is about a potential pitfall in this sporting evolution and about the spurious hot air it’s engendering in the meantime.

First up, a newsflash. Biles and Osaka have been neither “brave” nor “heroic”. They have simply shown the kind of resolve that the least of us must show more than once in our lives if that life is not to be a car crash.

They recognised they had a problem and that they needed time to sort it out, so they stepped away. That was neither courage nor cowardice, but fortitude. Somewhere in the middle.

Alas, in our frantic efforts to “just be kind”, too often these days we’re just being silly. This was the BBC’s Samantha Quek on Biles’ commendable decision not to hide after pulling out.

“She got her tracksuit back on, she got out there and she stood and clapped on her teammates…to me, that is a champion.”

To me, that is a statement that makes no sense whatsoever. Champions are the ones with their tracksuits off, who get out there and win stuff. Biles is entitled to a modicum of sympathy and understanding but she does not get to have reality warped on her behalf.

Unfortunately, she may not have been above doing a little warping herself by the sound of it. Listen to this interview from the 1:02 mark, especially the closing segment:

“It’s okay sometimes to…sit out the big competitions, to focus on yourself, because it shows how strong of a competitor and person that you really are…rather than just battle through it.”

Hark at the slightly dismissive tone with which those last six words are spoken. As if “just” battling through were the inferior option now; something lesser athletes do.

I can remember the stand-up comedian Ben Elton, thirty years ago, bewailing a world in which bad is so often represented as good and good as bad. In view of where we’ve gone since, I wonder if he dares leave the house these days.

In one area, however, Samantha Quek was quite correct. It is long overdue for mental health to be afforded the same credibility as physical health, particularly now, when sports personalities face not just trial by media but trial by social media. The same goldfish bowl, but beneath a much larger spotlight, and with infinitely more faces pressed against the glass; some of them distinctly unsavoury.

That parity in the health of body and mind, however, must be applied consistently. Which means that when athletes withdraw from competition citing mental health issues, they cannot be outraged when the media politely asks to see a doctor’s note.

Because for as long as there have been physical ailments, there have been those who milk them. Ask anyone in the workplace and most will be able to recall a colleague at some point in their careers who was heading for the exit at the merest hint of a sniffle or headache.

If you seriously think that there will never be an athlete in the future who uses mental health as a smokescreen for bruised ego or a disinclination to take the rough with the smooth, then I have a bridge over the Tyne that I’d like to sell you.

And because of the problems that those frauds will create for those with genuine mental health concerns, there can be no unquestioning free pass for anyone. Just as you can’t be off for more than a couple of days without your boss asking to see a sick note.

Luckily, I believe the media can play a key role in this filtering process. When a sportsperson pulls out of an event because of mental health issues, I suggest the press gives itself 48 hours to talk about it — which is important — and then the competitor concerned gets full radio silence until he or she decides to come back. Media focus switches exclusively to the grinders still out there, giving it everything they have, through thick and thin.

If you have a genuine mental health issue, this media holiday will be manna from heaven. You get to step out of the goldfish bowl and work on your problems, free of prying eyes and repetitive questions for as long as you choose.

If you’re just gaming the system, on the other hand… Well, let’s just say that if one or two athletes respond to becoming their sports’ forgotten people by returning to the spotlight with an alacrity suggesting a recovery of New Testament proportions, we shouldn’t be too surprised.

Human nature can be a mental health issue all of its own.

Boca Juniors and the natural conclusion for VAR in football

Pic courtesy of Marco Verch

I smiled when they said replay technology was coming to football.

I laughed out loud when they said it would improve the game.

Many times since the advent of VAR, when a decision has come down from on high, only for the whining among footballers to continue regardless, has my cynicism been vindicated.

Last week, however, that vindication reached its peak and VAR in football its nadir.

Two VAR calls went against the Argentine team Boca Juniors in their Copa Libertadores matches with Brazil’s Atletico Mineiro. The latter ultimately went through on penalties.

To say that the club I will henceforth call Boca Infants wasn’t happy would be an understatement.

And let’s face it, who can blame them? Some upstart in a booth, armed only with objectivity plus high-definition, frame-by-frame, ultra-slowmo replays filmed from every available angle, dares to presume that he knows better?

Better than 11 men drunk on a cocktail of testosterone and adrenaline, with the benefit of a full split-second in which to play judge and jury?

The sheer impertinence of it.

No, let those wimps in tennis and American football adopt replay technology with barely a hitch, if they must. Football as the rest of the world knows it is made of sterner stuff: full of visionaries who realise that VAR is but extra fuel on the fire. As it was always destined to be.

I know professional footballers past and present bridle at the suggestion that they’re all a bit thick. Many of them are nothing of the sort.

But the intellectually-honest among them must surely realise that sorry episodes like this are what feeds that perception. They are the reason why the phrase “bloody footballers”, accompanied by a roll of the eyes, has been a cultural meme since before we even knew what cultural memes were.

I’d knock the whole VAR thing on the head if I were you, football. You’re trying to sell sophistication to people who just aren’t having it. Bless them.

The way England players conduct themselves is “none of your business”. Since when?

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I don’t write this post lightly. Back to back blog entries taking shots at my hero, and the vague, nagging dread that I’m starting to sound like this man (minus the aggression and kidnapping, I hasten to add).

Alas, Martin Samuel stumbles on from his weird flip-flopping over Gareth Southgate to a piece of tosh concerning his players that cannot go unchallenged.

I have two problems with footballers ripping runners-up medals from their necks within seconds of a dignitary placing them there. I think they make a motivational error and drop a behavioural clanger.

Defeat should be taken squarely on the chin, not concealed in the palm of your hand or buried in a drawer. When you remember well and truly what second-best felt like, the days when it’s you going up last for your medal will feel so much sweeter.

Optics-wise, meanwhile; you look like a petulant child. There is no getting away from that.

Now if the Mail columnist wants to dismiss both arguments and suggest that anyone espousing the first one clearly hasn’t the first idea how professional athletes process defeat, then that’s his prerogative. Had he left it that, this post wouldn’t have been written

Martin Samuel, however chose to defend England’s de-medallers following the Euro 2020 Final, with a statement so odd, it needs to to be set out in full, lest you think I’m making it up.

“England’s achievements are none of your business 

“A small clarification for those offended that some England players took their runners-up medals off after receiving them on Sunday: it’s not about you. They reached a final, not you. They lost, not you. It is their medal and their right to wear it or not.

“Some will still take pride in getting to the final, others do not want a ready reminder of defeat. Either way, it isn’t your business.“

I’ve just read that through a third time to make sure I’m not missing some deep sarcasm here. Sadly, I think I’m good.

Several years ago, when basketball star LeBron James spoke up on matters political, Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham caught all hell for suggesting that he “shut up and dribble”. Samuel’s implicit suggestion that football’s paying-through-the-nose customers should shut up and watch, deserves no less a fate.

Those small fortunes don’t buy us the right to stalk, threaten or racially abuse. They do most definitely buy us the right to opine. On anything players representing our country might do while in the office. Whether those opinions are spot-on or wider than a Chris Waddle penalty is beside the point.

And look who’s arguing otherwise, for goodness’ sake. A man who’s spent several decades paying the bills by making every nuance of sport generally, his business. Its villains and heroes, its right and wrongs; all fair game. How come it’s okay for the so-called ‘dukes’ of sports media to shine a light in whatever corner they please, while the serfs who actually pay to get in need to know their place?

Let’s hope you have a better Olympics than you did Euros, Martin.

If I might make so bold.