Sportsmen’s Wives

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31340, 10 April 1967, Page 12

Sportsmen’s Wives

The ban on wives of New Zealand athletes at future Olympic and Commonwealth Games deserves to be flouted. The New Zealand Olympic and British Empire Games Association has announced that it would “ view with displeasure ” the presence of wives on these occasions, and the Auckland Athletic Centre has asked the association its reasons for the ban. The centre must be aware of the reasons, in general terms: competitors or officials whose wives are staying in the same city are apt to be distracted from their training or from their official duties, and the team’s performance may suffer accordingly. Instances, no doubt, could be cited by the association in support of its ban. Competitors and officials at these meetings, with few exceptions, have their expenses paid by the sports bodies which sponsor them. If they take their wives they must expect to pay all their wives’ expenses, to travel and live with the team, and to spend little time with their wives. Athletes and their wives who accept these conditions cause no concern to team managers. Wives following their husbands on cricket tours are even more of a problem to administrators because of the greater distances travelled by cricket teams and the longer duration of cricket tours. Occasionally, when a leading player in a touring side has insisted on it, his wife has accompanied him and stayed at the same hotel. Such arrangements are seldom satisfactory. Writing in the 1967 Wisden Cricketers’ Almanac, E. M. Wellings says: “Wide ‘‘experience of touring during the last 20 years has “ firmly persuaded me that wives accompanying “ cricketers are a liability, however well they behave “and aim to keep in the background. ...” The alternative—the loss of a key player to the touring side—may be even more of a liability to the tour, at least financially.

Perhaps the best solution to the problem of touring wives of cricketers and athletes is the

encouragement of “ supporters’ tours ” by the sports authorities. Wives and other sports fans could then secure the advantages of group travel; the leader of such a party—appointed, perhaps, by the sports body concerned—might be given some official status, and could handle most problems without disturbing officials or members of the team. Cricketers and athletes whose wives travelled in well-organised parties would have few of the worries which they must often have under present arrangements. An arbitrary ban is likely to encourage players to resort to subterfuges, which might land themselves and their wives in worse predicaments than at present.