2012 Sports review

[The Fish 9245]

2012: A truly remarkable sporting year to be relished over and over

 

The nation was hooked up to a nonstop adrenaline pump, an experience unlikely to be repeated in the lifetime of anyone old enough to have taken it in properly

Mo Farah was embraced by the nation after he won the 5,000 and 10,000m double at London 2012. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

 

 

Is it really over? Has the final whistle been blown, the last point decided and the finish line crossed? Have the stumps been drawn, is the light fading over the 18th green, are the bookies paying out? Are we supposed to wake up now?

From the Etihad Stadium to the Allianz Arena, from the Champs Elysées to the Olympic Park, from Flushing Meadows to Twickenham, from the Medinah Country Club to the Wankhede Stadium, the story of the year ran and ran. In the middle ages they would have commemorated such a saga by setting the weavers to work on something that would have made the Bayeux Tapestry look like a pamphlet. Our modern equivalent, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, has never been under less pressure to justify its existence.

 

Just for a moment, let's set aside the question of how all this may play out for future generations. Not everything has to be about legacy. Just spend a moment enjoying it all for what it was, an experience unlikely to be repeated in the lifetime of anyone old enough to have taken it in properly.

 

For Aled Davies, and so many like him, 2012 will never be over. Davies was born without a fibula in his right leg. In its place grew a ferocious competitive will. On the first morning of the Paralympics' athletic competition in the Olympic Stadium, in front of a capacity crowd, the expression on the 21-year-old's face was one of wonder as he mounted the podium to collect his bronze medal for the shot put. Before that day, few outside Bridgend had heard of him. Now he was listening to a roar from the throats of 80,000 people, delivering their approval on behalf of the nation. Two days later he was back, this time waving from the top step as he collected a gold medal in the discus.

 

Davies's story was only one among many that populated a year without precedent. His astonished expression, quite as much as any that flitted across the faces of Bradley Wiggins, Ian Poulter, Jessica Ennis, Nicola Adams, Andy Murray, Alastair Cook, Chris Robshaw, Roberto Di Matteo, Ellie Simmonds, Rory McIlroy, Mo Farah, Laura Trott, Ben Ainslie, David Weir or Katherine Grainger during the year, seemed to encapsulate everything good about a sporting grand opera that would stop providing encores only when the calendar declared a halt.

It was a year when the nation seemed to have hooked itself and its athletes up to a nonstop adrenaline pump. And thanks to the unique properties of the Olympic Games, with the Paralympics more closely bound in to the pageant than ever before, we were given a prolonged close-up of the dramatic consequences on a human being of the heights and depths of sporting fortune.

 

Emotions were yanked from one end of the spectrum to the other, sometimes with a simplicity that evoked cheers or tears but often in complicated ways that were less familiar and much harder to analyse and describe. Words were useless, of course, when it came to a response such as that produced by the achievement of Martine Wright, a marketing executive who lost her legs in the bombings of 7 July 2005 – the day after London had been awarded the Olympics – and went on to represent Britain in the sitting volleyball competition at the Paralympics. Watched by her three-year-old son, Wright was part of a team that also included a woman soldier who had almost bled to death in Iraq and a 13-year-old girl with a prosthetic leg.

 

The summer told us a great deal about who we are and what, as a society, we have become, although there are no guarantees that the new understanding will be taken to heart. But surely the sight of Farah, who came to England as a refugee from Somalia, achieving his 5,000m and 10,000m double must have given pause for thought to critics of Britain's relatively open policy on immigration. Ennis, the daughter of a black father and a white mother, was another adding a new layer of meaning to the combination of flags making up the union flag draped around her shoulders.

 

When did it start, this avalanche of delight and instruction? Perhaps on 13 May, in the 95th minute of the last match of the Premier League season at the Etihad Stadium, when Sergio Agüero produced the finish that won the Premier League title for Manchester City. Six days later Frankel came home five lengths ahead of the field in the Lockinge Stakes, opening the run of five wins during the season that lifted him, so the judges say, into the realm of equine immortality. The success of the four-year-old bay colt – and his jockey, Tom Queally – was followed that evening by the last-gasp victory in Munich that made Chelsea the first London club to capture the Champions League. Two months later, Wiggins became the first British rider to win the Tour de France, first held in 1903. We really were in the land of dreams.

 

And when, after the great convulsion of the Olympics and Paralympics, did it end? Still to come, as the last flame was snuffed out on Thomas Heatherwick's magnificent cauldron, were Europe's astonishing fightback in the Ryder Cup, Celtic's victory over the world's best club side, England's mauling of the seemingly invincible All Blacks, Monty Panesar's dismissal of Sachin Tendulkar in Mumbai, and the mass sigh of relief that greeted Murray's US Open win.

 

Long ago, the British taught the world how to play sport, and then had to endure the bittersweet experience of watching Australian cricketers, Brazilian footballers, German tennis players, Kenyan distance runners, American golfers and New Zealand rugby men do it better. This year Britain not only returned to competitiveness in certain long-neglected areas but also showed the world how to watch sport.

London was my sixth Olympics. All had something distinctive and memorable to offer – even Atlanta, thanks to Muhammad Ali and Michael Johnson. The enjoyment was particularly marked in Barcelona, emerging from the long night of the Franco era, and in Sydney, where the Australian love of sport was given free expression. None, however, matched London for the sheer enthusiasm with which the Games and its sequel were greeted.

 

Everyone who was living in or visited London will cherish their own special memory of the collective sense of joy and goodwill. Mine came on the day the cycling time trials were held over a course that started and finished in front of Hampton Court Palace. Entry was free to the whole 44km course with the exception of the start and finish areas, so people unable to get into the ticketed events in the main stadium, the velodrome, the Aquatic Centre and elsewhere were given the chance to get a glimpse of Olympic competition. And how eagerly they seized it.

 

As the sun came out to welcome the men's race, the roadsides were packed, with the spectators often standing five and six deep. Wiggins and Chris Froome, the British competitors, were cheered wildly, as befitted men who had finished first and second in the Tour de France and were among the top favourites for this event. But every rider – including the Iranian and the Turk who posted the slowest times – shared the experience of surfing a high-decibel wave of unstinting encouragement.

 

The year wasn't only about the Olympics and Paralympics, of course, although the sustained gasp of surprise at their popular success dominated the summer. The glow of delight spread everywhere. Day after day, in a time of austerity and simmering social unrest, the news was dominated by the deeds of sporting heroes, some would say at the expense of a proper examination of more serious issues.

No one could ignore that figure of £9.3bn spent on London 2012. Mushrooming from an initial estimate of £2.7bn, the ever-expanding budget had generated enormous resentment and a cynicism further fuelled by the farces over online ticket purchasing and – at the last minute – the inability of private contractors to provide the agreed numbers of security personnel. But even that had its upside, when the armed forces, summoned to fill the breach at ticket checkpoints and bag scans, successfully grabbed the opportunity to reconnect with the citizenry. In the end the whole vast organism simply worked so well that earlier this very week, more than three months after the gates closed on the Olympic Park, and deep into the chill of a cash-strapped winter, a Guardian/ICM poll revealed that, with a bit of time to reflect, 78% of the population considered the enterprise to have been worth the money.

 

Since it would be hard to get 78% of the British population to agree on the date of Christmas, this was a remarkable indication of consensus. It became more remarkable still when the figures were broken down to reveal that not only was the approval evenly spread across the range of ages but that the gender divide was equally well balanced, with 77% of women and 79% of men in favour.

Women had their best-ever year in British sport, and although it was not possible – given the scale of Wiggins's achievements – for one of them to mark it by winning the BBC's award, at least they were fairly represented on the shortlist. While the Olympics and Paralympics were in progress, their achievements received at least as much prominence as that of men in the media coverage, although it has been all too easy to identify the swift reversion to the status quo ante, meaning that once again whole days can go by without a mention of women on the nation's sports pages, while their chief presence on the screen is a decorative one, whether reading out the sports news or enticing male athletes into giving a post‑match interview.

 

The plight of Britain's brilliant women cyclists offers a salutary example. Most of them came away from the Games with medals round their necks but knowing that next year they would be wearing the jerseys of underfunded teams in events for which there is no television coverage. The remedy is for the governing body to take a proactive stance, insisting that all registered teams also enter women riders and that men's and women's races share the broadcasting package. The sport that commits itself to such a policy may find that it has created a template for others to use.

 

Although no sporting event on earth owes more to corporate sponsors than the Olympics, somehow grace and humanity kept winning through, whether it was Kirani James, winner of the men's 400m, searching out Oscar Pistorius, the Blade Runner, to swap race numbers at the end of the final, or Gemma Gibbons, the 25-year-old British silver medal winner in the judo competition, who pointed to the sky and mouthed "I love you, Mum" in a remembrance of a single mother who had encouraged her interest before dying when Gemma was 17.

Such moments led many to lament the imminent return of the Premier League, its squalid dramas always threatening to monopolise the oxygen of publicity. The sagas of Luis Suárez and Patrice Evra and of John Terry and Anton Ferdinand had dragged football into a noxious swamp from which England's performance at the Euro 2012 finals under Roy Hodgson, a respected and well-liked manager appointed in the wake of Fabio Capello's expensive and ill-timed departure, was predictably unable to extricate it.

 

Earlier Manchester City had produced a shattering denouement to the domestic season, Agüero's goal dashing the smiles from the faces of Sir Alex Ferguson and his Manchester United players, who believed for a couple of breathless minutes that a win at Sunderland had allowed them to retain their hold on the title. Not since Felipe Massa enjoyed 38 seconds of euphoria in São Paulo in 2008 before Lewis Hamilton crossed the line to snatch the Formula One title had ultimate triumph been so brutally ripped away.

 

Chelsea's success in the Champions League came 57 years after the myopic, xenophobic leadership of the Football League denied the club permission to represent England in the inaugural edition of the tournament. Still washing the blood of André Villas-Boas from his hands, Roman Abramovich saw the squad regroup under Di Matteo and beat Liverpool in the FA Cup final while grinding out Champions League victories against Barcelona and Bayern. This was not the way the oligarch dreamed his team would play on such gala occasions, and Di Matteo would soon be paying the price for the nature of his success. Meanwhile Abramovich went on replenishing the squad, only to see them become the first holders in the history of the trophy to fall at the first hurdle next time out.

 

Away from football and the Olympics, a group of individuals produced feats that, in any other year, would have had them standing alone at the pinnacle. With Ivan Lendl providing wise counsel, Murray became the first Briton to reach the Wimbledon men's singles final since Bunny Austin in 1938, and his tears in defeat had finally won hearts before his Olympic gold medal became the springboard from which to secure his first grand slam victory in the US Open, the first for a British man since Fred Perry in 1936. McIlroy won the US PGA Championship, his second major, on the way to heading the US and European money lists, memorably snuffed out the high-flying Keegan Bradley in the singles round of the Ryder Cup, and ended the year as the world's No1. Cook, a bling-free golden boy, refused to take the award of the England captaincy as a reason to stop scoring runs in vast quantities and became the country's leading Test century-maker while guiding his team to their first series victory in India since 1984-85.

 

And of course there was Wiggins, with a feat unimaginable before Dave Brailsford, British Cycling's performance director, conceived and executed a master plan that reached its climax in Paris on 22 July. The thought that Britain is now the world's top cycling nation still makes anyone with more than five minutes' experience of the sport pinch themselves – while crossing the fingers of the other hand in the hope that a new generation of riders will avoid the choices that led to Lance Armstrong being stripped of his honours this year.

 

So the great carnival ended, with a last round of applause for Lionel Messi's 91st goal of 2012. Here was a useful reminder – along with the deeds of Usain Bolt, Hashim Amla, Gabrielle Douglas, Alex Zanardi, David Rudisha, Anna Meares and others – that not everything good about the year came wrapped in a union flag. If this was a dream of a year, it was a dream that had room for everyone.

 

Personal highlights for me would be; Ennis' Gold, final day of the 11/12 season, Man Utd in January, Jonnie Peacock 100m and Mo Farah's 10k

[Tooj 17]

Can't wait for the Ashes whitewash in 2013.

[Meenzer 14143]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/dec/28/sport-in-review-2012

[AnthonyTB1990 0]

Hi guys, wasn't sure where to post this as this is my first ever post. Not really a review of the sporting year, but an article I've wrote detailing key aspects of NUFC's current predicament, but mainly focused around the month of December. I'd really appreciate it if some of you guys could take a look at it as I'd value any constructive criticisms or basically just any feedback whatsoever cheers!! Anthony.

 

Here's the link; http://hawkonsport.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/setting-scene-nufc.html