JOHNNY WATTERSONlooks at all things sport
Pollock broken but unbroken
AT 22 years old, Mark Pollock detached his retinas in an accident and his life became one of darkness. A former international rower and Commonwealth Games medallist from Belfast, blindness was the first challenge to the now 34-year- old in a life which has become defined by his conquering of the odds.
Provocative in what he could or couldn’t do and defiant about perceived limitations, he raced to the South Pole and competed in the recent Round Ireland yacht race. Pollock became the heavyweight champion looking for a fight, wondering where the next one would come from but never fearing the opponent.
At this year’s Henley Regatta he accidentally tumbled from a second story window and sustained almost fatal injuries. The can-do attitude didn’t dim but for the first time, the test was not the challenge but the arena of engagement.
“It has been two weeks since my accident,” he said last week. “I fractured the back of my head. My chest and torso seemed to be filled with blood and my back is broken in three places, I think, plus some ribs. I don’t know why the fall let me away so lightly and I am still trying to work out how I am still alive. Now, two weeks on, I do not feel like I am in danger of dying. But the question of what I should feel is on my mind now . . .
“For the past 10 years I have been helping companies to redefine how they approach challenges and take action to deal with them. I tell people to deal in facts, make it happen, and build the right team around them for the job. It worked when I went blind and it worked for the South Pole, Gobi desert and all my adventure races.
“But right now I am nervous about applying my own code to my current situation. I have no feeling from my belly button to my toes. Right now I cannot even turn on to my side. I am flat on my back in the most specialised spinal unit in the world and I am surrounded by guys who are currently paralysed from either the neck, chest or waist down. I am better off than many of these guys and worse than some. But the question that I cannot answer is – am I one of these guys at all?
“The first step for me in a crisis is to start dealing in facts. But I am struggling to work out what they are. Are my legs temporarily asleep or am I just in denial? If I embrace and accept that my legs are not working then will I shut off the power of the mind to fix what we do not understand?
“I read a book called Good to Great by Jim Collins once. He spoke about the Stockdale Principle in relation to long-term prison camps and how optimists were not the ones who survived. Realists did. The reason was the optimists kept thinking they would be free soon but never faced the reality they may never get out. As a result, they were constantly disappointed and many died in their cells. But the realists dealt in facts, the reality of their current circumstances. They went on to survive.
“I can deal in the reality of today. My legs don’t work. I am in hospital and the doctors cannot tell me if I will get any feeling back. This is the current reality. What I do not know is should I be super positive and say I will make a full recovery or do I risk being a Stockdale optimist? Or do I start preparing myself for never walking again?”
Those most recent ideas arrived last week from Pollock’s hospital bed in London. Thoughts drift towards the lack of self-pity and a dreadful clarity that gives the lie to any concept of collapse or surrender.
Now we are inept enough to host Olympics
THE COST to British taxpayers for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan since the Twin Tower attacks on 9/11 recently passed the €24 billion mark. That’s just a little less money than the Government will have to commit towards capitalising the Irish banks.
It has surely occurred to many people that for the cost of our present and our children’s future we could have afforded the Olympic Games after all. We could have made Gay Mitchell’s dream come true. In hindsight we should curse our myopic vision and applaud the Fine Gael politician for his commitment to the big idea.
London’s revised budget for delivering the Games in 2012 is €8.62 billion. Assuming that figure will probably turn out to be wholly inaccurate in two years’ time but taking it as all we have at the moment, if we had shown the same bottle in the 1990s when the Olympic idea was mooted, bottle demonstrably shown in dealing with the banks over the last year, we could have staged three successive Olympic Games.
Given our own experience of political and fiduciary incompetence we must now be concerned about Brazil, who will host the World Cup in 2014 as well as the 2016 Olympic Games.
Even Fifa are nervous as work has started on only six of the 12 stadiums. Organisers also appear to be of a mind to build it and they will come. Instead of opting for cities with respected local clubs and large numbers of fans, authorities have decided to use cities such as Manaus in the Amazon, which was chosen over regional neighbour Belém, Manaus has virtually no football. It has one club in the Serie D with an average of around 1,000 fans per game.
Brazil is reportedly preparing to spend €543 billion over the next five to six years on infrastructure, while Rio, Brazil’s Olympic hosts, needs an additional 19,000 hotel rooms, or, about 100 new hotels.
When the figures come home to roost the reality is we can actually afford anything if we can bear the cost. €24 billion for a war or a bank?
Of course, subliminally, sport is war anyway.
GAA should consider Taylor on fencing
WITH ALL the talk of fencing, the GAA will be prudent enough to read the Taylor Report before bringing in the security companies. Commissioned on April 15th, 1989 and presented to the British Parliament by The Rt Hon Lord Justice Taylor in January 1990, it opens with the salutary observation.
“Amazingly, complacency was still to be found after Hillsborough, with a common club chairman reaction being, “It couldn’t happen here”.”
Thankfully, Ireland has never had a Hillsborough, where 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death. But one of Taylor’s recommendations was to lower the height of fencing in British grounds to 2.2 metres and make the fences comply with strict guidelines, ie self-contained units with their own safety gates, toilets and snack bars so numbers are strictly controlled. In Chapter 4 Taylor explains why fences were erected in the first place:
“They were installed at many grounds to stop pitch invasions in the 1970s,” he says, before outlining some features of crowd control that might be less aggressive than caging.
He pointed to provisions in a 1985 Act that made it an offence to be in, or attempt to enter, a designated sports ground whilst drunk. In Scotland they arrested fans but in England they viewed arrest as flawed as it took police officers away from their posts to process paper work.
Taylor also recommended “that consideration should be given to creating an offence of disorderly conduct at a sports ground”.
This would include throwing missiles, including plastic bottles, racist chants and pitch invasions.
Taylor explained the object of legislating was not for the police to prosecute cases but to deter fans, or hooligans, as they were and are called in Britain, from coming on to the pitch during or after matches.
He concluded: “I think it prudent to have a criminal sanction against pitch invasion.”
The GAA is not British football of the 1970s or 1980s but the GAA have a serious problem with “hooligans”. Hillsborough, it was generally agreed, came down to two issues, poor policing and fencing.
Bad attitude abounds on this Tour
F I N A L S T R A W:THE TOUR de France has seamlessly taken over sport's bad attitude vibe from football. The Netherlands' tour de force against Spain, loosely based on Bruce Lee classics Fists of Fury and Enter The Dragon, was 24-carat cynical until cycling's Mark Renshaw saw an opening. He brazenly head-butted New Zealand's Julian Dean during a stage finish and took a bullet for the team.
That episode arrived after officials were instructed to scan bikes for hidden motors as a rumour had gathered that teams were secreting tiny machines in the frames to aid riders. And before you could say ‘Nice Glasgow Handshake, Mark’, Alberto Contador was shredding decades of Tour tradition by streaking away from the stricken Andy Schleck, whose chain had slipped off.
There was no naked roguery among the Spaniards, French, English or Americans at the recent British Open in St Andrews last week and you have to ask, why cycling? Contador’s opportunism was like Paul Casey opening a packet of crisps at the top of Louis Oosthuizen’s back swing. Surviving the crazy piles ups, the category one climbs and the savage heat, cyclists need to have the mongrel gene.
Respect for them is knowing the sport’s strengths are occasionally its flaws too.
Will Aviva crowd sing like the old days?
RUGBY WAS the poster chap of the Celtic Tiger years. When we look back and see the glitter of Triple Crown and Six Nations Championship trophies, we may be able to see a brighter side to the boom time that consumed itself and according to economists, will eat its farrow too.
Leinster’s ability to attract over 15,000 to some Magners League matches at the RDS has been miraculously sustained in the few rancid years since. But when figures are put out for ticket sales, what does that mean?
For the opening rugby match of the Aviva Stadium it has been advertised that 40,000 tickets have been sold. That represents the combined number of all the tickets sold, including all of the pre-sold seats, 10-year-tickets etc.
It would be a surprise – and a pleasant one – if in mid-summer the IRFU actually attracted all those bums to brand new seats for a combo-provincial underage match of little consequence.
Maybe the bragging rights of bearing witness to the historic first Aviva Stadium rugby match is too irresistible and the stadium will sing like the good old days. Remember them? You could watch O’Gara kick the winner at the Millennium Stadium, then chopper back to Dublin to see Bernard Dunne win a world title at The Point?
