Guile and Greatness

We get excited easily, don’t we? When I watched Floyd Landis surging ahead in the last phase of the Tour de France like a soul-in-chase, I got excited.
That’s how sports journalists live. On excitement, and adjectives.

The Mennonite good boy, with a degenerative hip and the epic race, had forced me break my promise of a family outing. I read up his details like a studious schoolboy.

I picked out adjectives, serenaded with sentences, till the news hit me flush on the face. The guy was ‘on it’.

I felt the frustration of the cheated. The pain gnawed at my heart. My adjectives paled into irrelevance. Sentences crumbled like wafers.

The greatest comeback story in Europe’s most popular sporting event has fallen flat. We are back to the familiar cycle of allegations and denials. Sample A and Sample B. IOC, WADA and UCI.

Boy, haven’t we heard all these many times?

Then cropped up Mr Gatlin, from nowhere, to say he too was tested positive for testosterone. Gatlin, of all people, who has been trumpeting the virtues of clean win?

Then the turn of Trevor Graham, Gatlin’s coach, to come up with a sabotage theory. A mystic masseur rubbing testosterone onto his champion ward. It is hard to believe, but you never know what these people do in the greenroom.

Graham’s past does not favour his future. He has been involved with at least half a dozen athletes who have received drug suspensions. The International Association of Athletics Federation and US Anti-Doping Agency say they will penalise him if Gatlin is found guilty. Gatlin, who has once tested positive, can be banned for life.

Sports lawyers give both Landis and Gatlin little chance of redemption. We don’t know. We don’t know anything at all.

We get excited. Moronic?

Let’s talk about something pleasant.

I heaved a sigh of relief when Roger Federer, finally, broke the jinx against Rafael Nadal. Not that Nadal is an upstart. He is an exciting facet but Federer had to win.

Okay, we give it to the Spaniard when he played like a dream to win the French Open. His attire suits muddy boots and red socks.

But the “grasshopper” must have his revenge when the ball rolls on the grass. The Wimbledon oozes tradition and history. Agreed, an overgrown teenager won it more than 20 years ago and defended it the next year. But Boris Becker was born to play on grass. Nadal is not Becker on grass.

The Swiss star, at the time of writing this a couple of months ago, was in Dubai. He was staying in one of the beach hotels. Wonder why he had chosen to fly into the heat while every other man flies out of the country to escape sun-stroke. But Federer is not every other man.

The world of sports can be funny, too.

Tiger Woods did not forget to text Annika Sorenstam, in case she didn’t know that he has won one more major. When winning is routine, sending sms might thrill the champions.

Or leaking e-mails, should I say?