Morning:
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TODAY of all soul-destroying days, the last intention of anyone humane is to depress you further. For 2 January is the day on which the Godfearing take to the dressing gown and slippers, angrily tossing aside that compendium of Scandinavian drama on the grounds that the plays are too light-hearted for the mood.
This year the neo-Strindbergian weltschmertz is fiercer than ever. Added to the usual post-festive season blues is enough misery about the economic future to remind us of a fabled New Year Message from a Communist tyrant of yore. "This year will be harder than last year," Enver Hoxha told Albania's Party of Labour as dawn broke over 1969. "On the other hand, it will be easier than next year."
Enver's problem was that the only amusement known to Tirana then was the filmic oeuvre of Norman Wisdom. Thankfully we have a more effective antidote to gloom than a dyspraxic halfwit falling headlong into a window display. We have sport. What 2009 will bring only an idiot would guess (see below), but there will be enough magnificent moments to make life worth living because there always are.
That's the good news. The less good news is that it will be harder than last year, for there has never been a sporting year like 2008 and never will be again.
Even disregarding the most electrifying contest of all for the Democratic presidential nomination (as Hillary's husband told us, politics is a combat sport), the reinforced floor of the memory bank creaks under the weight of 24-carat deposits. And of how many banks can that currently be said?
Forced to retrieve one when the bailiffs come calling, many would return to that Sunday in July when Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal produced a miracle of sporting perfection. Plumbing the depths of his self-belief time and time again, Federer somehow dragged the match into a fifth set of such all-consuming drama that the protagonists seemed to exist in a hermetically sealed bubble of their own creation.
Entirely unaware of the raucous crowd, utterly impervious to the extreme tension, every time they raised tennis to a previously unimagined zenith of genius they raised it once again. "This is different tennis than anything we've seen," whispered awe-struck commentator Andrew Castle, and he said that right.
Finally, after five hours of play and moments before the last scrap of daylight deserted Centre Court, the unstoppable force shifted the immovable object, and Nadal imbued Spain's Crown Princess with the sweatiest royal handshake England has known since Bobby Moore gingerly gripped the Queen's glove in 1966. Until then, one had assumed that 2008 would belong to Tiger Woods, who became the first golfer to win a major on one leg. Having played four US Open rounds in agony due to ruptured knee ligaments (not to mention a double stress fracture of the leg), he then endured an 18-hole play-off against the endearing journeyman Rocco Mediate.
Wincing in excruciation every time he drove off, knowingly subjecting that knee to career-threatening pressure, Woods forged victory from near-certain defeat with a display of raw physical courage no one who watched it will forget.
Nor will amnesia have a prayer against the Beijing Olympics. With respect to our cyclists and rowers, to Christine Ohuorogu and Rebecca Adlington, these Games belonged to a beanpole Jamaican. What we weirdo sporting obsessives most crave are those exceedingly rare moments when the action yanks us to our feet screaming "I can't believe what my eyes are telling me" at the telly.
Usain Bolt provided two. First, in the 100m semi-final, he was so far ahead that he spent almost half the race ambling home paying insouciant homage to his own genius. He did have to break sweat in the 200m final, admittedly, but only to break a world record we thought would survive for decades. It is to the eternal credit of the previous holder that, commentating for the BBC, Michael Johnson was so overjoyed at the emergence of a staggering talent. There was the inevitable smattering of turkey a feckless European capitulation in the Ryder Cup, for instance, a plethora of lame defeats for England's rugby union XV, and the wearisome sight of Paula Radcliffe sobbing her way to a medal-free Marathon finish in the Olympics.
But among many other sublime moments was the scintillating defeat of Nadal with which Andy Murray announced his arrival among tennis's Big Four and a sparkling Euro 2008 in which the Germans lost the final to a young Spanish team of great cohesion and vibrancy. But almost the best was saved until last.
How Lewis Hamilton won the Formula One drivers' championship in Brazil in October, even he had little idea. Needing to finish fifth, he was relegated to sixth with two laps left after his McLaren team calculated that the rain would intensify enough to necessitate softer tyres. By the thinnest film of saliva on the skin of their teeth, they were proved right. On virtually the last corner of the season, the rain fell more heavily, causing the Austrian Timo Glock to lose grip and enabling Hamilton to pass him with seconds to spare.
There has never been a Grand Prix like that one, any more than there was ever a golfing major or tennis Grand Slam final like those won by Woods and Nadal, or indeed a sporting year like 2008. Those nuggets have been duly stored away to leaven the dark times ahead by conscientious sporting squirrels but even if they do not gleam quite as lustrously there are more to come.
The FA Cup begins in earnest tomorrow, Sunday brings the final of the World Darts Championship, England's football team should continue the renaissance under Fabio Capello, and the cricketers have every chance of regaining the Ashes against the amusingly weakened Aussies.
As for the Sports Personality of 2009, my money's on Andy Murray to secure it by becoming Britain's Grand Slam champ, quite possibly at the imminent Australian Open, since Fred Perry did his bit for national morale during the last Great Depression. One beauty of sport is that its power to soothe and elevate the troubled soul never relents for long, and seldom have we needed its sweet, banal distractions as we do today.
Reader views (2)
This country needs infrastructure and activities that bring in serious money. Sportsmen don't create electricity, build or run trains or hospitals or schools, create jewellery or invent high tech systems. Nor do they create farming jobs, build roads or protect forests, or always pay tax in this country. The National lottery has been hijacked for them at the expense of essentials. Given their high public profile, too many (not allo) of them sadly are not suitable role models for anyone.
- Helen, norwich, 07/01/2009 10:43
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Nice article and great sentiments, but I just can't look back and Hamilton's victory and think anything other than how hypocritical it is of him, particularly in these times of economic malaise, to drape himself in the Union Jack and then avoid paying any tax into the economy.
- St, UK, 02/01/2009 12:26
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