Sporting headlines far from ideal in 1988

Press, 28 December 1988, Page 30

Sporting headlines far from ideal in 1988

By

JON HENDERSON

of Reuter (through NZPA) London Ben Johnson in doping sensation, Mike Tyson in street brawl, soccer fans rampage through city centre — the chasm between sport’s ideal and its reality was never more apparent than in 1988.

The year’s more sensational headlines were as likely to proclaim reports of mayhem or malpractice as they were mighty deeds in the arena.

The story that overshadowed the Seoul Olympics was uncovered in a small office block, the downtown doping .control where Johnson, strutting hero of the men’s 100 m final, was unmasked as a drug-taking cheat. Tyson, the world heavyweight boxing champion, drew more publicity from his exploits outside the ring — street brawl, car crash and matrimonial squabbles — than he did from three title defences that lasted fewer than six rounds. The Netherlands won the European soccer championship with a performance that evoked a more stylish age, but the memory of fighting between rival fans in West German city centres will endure just as long. Year by year the pressure for and of success on those who take part and the excesses of those who look on give sport an increasingly tawdry look. At the end of 1988, its appearance was particularly unseemly.

There was, of course, much to admire during the year, not least South Korea’s near-faultless staging of the Olympics after a build-up made fraught by hostile North Korea’s attempts to act as co-hosts.

The Winter Olympics in Calgary confirmed the Italian, Alberto Tomba, the winner of two Alpine ski-ing golds, as an outstanding talent and the incomparable East German, Katerina Witt, won a second figure-skating title. Away from the Olympics, the American, Butch Reynolds, broke the oldest

individual track record and two men soared to new heights. Reynolds, running in Zurich in August, covered 400 m in 43.295, thus breaking by more than half a second Lee Evans’s record which had survived for 20 years. Sergei Bubka of the Soviet Union, who had broken the pole vault record on seven previous occasions, did so twice more and Cuba’s Javier Sotomayor, whose country boycotted Seoul, set a new high-jump standard, beating his previous best by five centimetres as he cleared 2.43 m.

Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten made towering contributions to the Netherlands’ European soccer triumph and in tennis Steffi Graf’s grand slam of the four major titles and Mat Wilander’s rise to the men’s No. 1 ranking stood out. Ivan Lendl had been No. 1 for three years and the Czechoslovak also lost his Masters title to West German Boris Becker.

Spain’s Severiano Ballesteros, who regained the British Open title, and Sandy Lyle of Britain, winner of the United States Masters, maintained the momentum of European golfing success while it was momentum of a different kind — that generated by the turbo boost of the all-conquer-ing McLaren racing car — that powered Brazil’s

Ayrton Senna to the world drivers’ title. But for all the excellence, international sport in 1988 invited the world to view it with a cynical eye.

If Johnson took drugs to cross the line first in the Olympic 100 m final, had the 1987 world champion previously been using them undetected? If, as is almost certainly the case, the Olympic drugbusters failed to catch all those athletes using dope, how many more were shooting steroids and not being caught? Substances designed to avoid detection are now being used almost as widely as those that improve performance.

And officialdom’s failure to raise convincingly an admonishing hand hardly enhanced sport’s image.

At the Winter Olympics, the Russian speedskater, Nikolai Gulyayev, won a gold medal, beating the American, Dan Jansen, who fell while leading the 1000 m, in spite of having been at the centre of a steroids-selling scandal before the Games. The International Cycling Union only last month in The Hague reduced its life sentence for a third drug offence to 12 months — and this at the end of a year in which the Tour de France had been smeared by drug taking. Pedro Delgado of Spain won cycling’s foremost race but the acclaim was not as generous as it might have been. Delgado was found to have taken the masking agent probenecid but was cleared because the drug, although banned by the International Olympic Committee, was not on the ICU’s proscribed list.

While in most cases drug taking is a result of the pressure for success, the dramas that surrounded Mike Tyson in 1988 had more to do with the strains of having already achieved it. ' The brawling fans who besmirched the European soccer championship might be the product of wider social problems, but the game sometimes appeared reluctant to ac-

cept it was a part of that society.

The America’s Cup would surely have headed a poll to find the year’s most farcical event. The contest betweeen a U.S. catamaran and a New Zealand monohull for yachting’s greatest prize was as great a mismatch as had always seemed likely and at the year’s end the New Zealanders were contesting their defeat in a New York court.

. The lawyers were also left to settle the unresolved business of the American football strike which marred a season climaxed by the Washington Redskins scoring 35 second-quarter points to beat the Denver Broncos 42-10 in the Super Bowl. It was only those sports spared the all-illuminating glare of global publicity which at least gave the impression that what really counted was the onfield action.

The performances of the world rugby union champion, New Zealand, were of the highest quality as it beat joint Five Nations champions Wales, 52-3 and 54-9, before going on to beat Australia, 2-0 in a three-match series.

A New Zealander was also responsible for the year’s outstanding cricket feat. Richard Hadlee drew clear as the international game’s most prolific wicket taker and pushed on towards claiming 400 test victims. Viv Richards became the first West Indian to score 100 hundreds.

Los Angeles laid claim to being regarded as the sporting city of the year.

The Los Angeles Lakers, behind the flashy play-making of Earvin “Magic” Johnson, became the first National Basketball Association team to repeat as champions since the 1969 Boston Celtics and the Dodgers rolled Oakland Athletics in five games to win baseball’s World Series.

The Los Angeles Kings, boosted by the arrival of Canadian Wayne Gretzky, “The Great One” of ice hockey, made an impressive start to the new season.