Peter Jackson: The tragedy of Australia's black fistic idol

Jim Corbett v Peter Jackson

Australia's greatest ever boxer Peter Jackson never forgot his first defeat. Years later on his deathbed in Roma in Western Queensland, Jackson discussed the matter at great length with his doctor Guy L’Estrange. That loss to Bill Farnan in 1884 in Melbourne was Australia’s first heavyweight fight with gloves. Jackson was already a famous and feared fighter and expected to win, despite carrying a leg injury. But Farnan beat him in three rounds.

We don’t know what rundown Jackson gave L’Estrange about the Farnan fight on his deathbed in 1901, tragically aged just 40. But there is evidence foul play was involved. In in its eulogy for Jackson, the boxing magazine The Referee published the suggestion Jackson was nobbled in the fight and had been “given a dose”.

Despite, or perhaps because of this grievance, the loss spurred Jackson onto greater things. Born in Christiansted on the island of St Croix in what was then the Danish West Indies (and is now the American Virgin Islands) in 1861, this black kid from the Caribbean found himself in the strange world of Sydney aged 16 and standing six feet tall. He was gentle and easy going and didn’t like a fight. But his weakness for food led him to Larry Foley’s Hotel. Larry Foley was one of Australia’s first boxing champions who was undefeated at bare-knuckle fighting. He liked the look of Jackson and tried him out in the back shed. Foley gave Jackson a job and the training he needed in ringcraft.

Jackson became as good as his mentor in bare-knuckle and would sometimes fight with his right arm bound. Four months after the Farnan loss, the pair held a rematch. The bout was indecisive with police stopping the fight in the sixth round after spectators stormed the ring. Farnan retained his title by default but lost it to Tom Lees two years later in 1886. Jackson beat Lees later that year to take the title. Foley gave him a special belt to celebrate the win, now in the possession of a Sydney based collector.

Having conquered Australia, Jackson went off to take on the best in the world in America. He arrived in 1888 and started with an 18 round victory over Black Canadian George Godfrey. Godfrey had previously tried to fight John L Sullivan but after Sullivan became world champion, he refused to fight black boxers. Jackson would run into the same problem with Sullivan - he would not “lower himself to fight a nigger” - and Jackson left frustrated for England.

Jackson chalked up two years of victories in England and returned to the US hoping to get another chance to take on the champion. But Sullivan still would not get in the ring with a black man and turned Jackson down. Instead, Jackson fought Sullivan’s main contender, Gentleman Jim Corbett. Jackson was five years Corbett’s senior and was ill for ten days before the fight in May 1891 and had a sprained ankle. Yet Jackson and Corbett slogged it out for 61 rounds for an energy sapping draw with most observers saying Corbett had the worst of it.

Though Corbett would later go on to defeat Sullivan and become world champion, it was the Jackson fight he remembered best in the biography The Roar of the Crowd. “That night I thought Peter Jackson was a great fighter. Six months later still tired from the fight, I thought him a greater one. I still maintain he was the greatest fighter I have ever seen.”

But Jackson would never lift the world crown. After the Corbett draw he went back to England and defeated the snarling Australian-Irish fighter Paddy Slavin to lift the British and Commonwealth titles in a difficult bout. The pair had bad blood since Sydney days and they still hated each other intensely. In the eighth round Slavin broke Jackson’s rib and a splinter punctured a lung. In intense pain, Jackson seemed beaten but rallied in the tenth to take control of the fight and pounded Slavin to pieces. The referee insisted the fight continue until Slavin was knocked out but the damage was fatal to Jackson.

The punctured lung never repaired and Jackson went on a downhill spiral. He was forced to appear in vaudeville, giving boxing exhibitions in circuses and as Jeff Rickert and Raymond Evans said about him in “Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History”, acting as a grey-wigged Uncle Tom in stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Suffering from tuberculosis, his last fight was against the powerful Jim Jeffries in 1898 and Jeffries knocked him out in five rounds.

Though Jackson always retained Danish citizenship, it was to Australia he returned in 1899, his career in ruins. He trained fighters in Sydney for a time but his TB worsened. On the advice of doctors, he retired to the dry heat of Roma, a shadow of the giant he once was. He died on July 13, 1901 at Argyle Cottage a privately run sanatorium which was later demolished to make way for the southern end of Roma’s airstrip. Dr L’Estrange put the cause of death of the “retired pugilist” as pulmonary phthisis exhaustion.

Jackson was due to be buried at Roma but there was a last minute change of plan. Another black West Indian boxer, Jack Dowridge from Barbados, who fought under the label of the Black Diamond, sent a telegram asking for the body to be sent by train to Brisbane. Jackson’s casket was escorted to Roma Railway Station by a band with a procession of sporting bodies and dignatories. In Brisbane, the procession went from Dowridge’s Hotel to Toowong Cemetery where he was buried in an unmarked grave.

Dowridge, with the help of several journalists and Jackson’s former coach Foley began to raise funds for a Jackson memorial. After a public subscription, Sydney mason Lewis Page carved a dazzling white Carrara marble monument over Jackson’s grave with an image that looks nothing like Jackson. The inscription repeats what Shakespeare’s Antony said about Julius Caesar “This was a man”.

But the best tribute was paid by Jack Johnson, an uppity black boxer from Galveston, Texas who achieved what was denied Jackson. On Boxing Day 1908, a white Australian crowd in Sydney was stunned when he defeated Canadian Tommy Burns to become the world’s first black heavyweight champion. A few weeks later he went to Brisbane and Dowridge took him to visit Jackson’s grave in Toowong. A.E. Austin of the Brisbane Courier said the living champion spent a quiet few moments in silent contemplation at the grave of his brother-in-arms. “It was an impressive sight to see the living gladiator kneeling for a moment over the tomb of he who was Australia’s fistic idol”, Austin wrote.

Olympics 2.012: NBCfail and the future

Photo via Nick Trask

LONDON is currently hosting the last Olympics of the twentieth century as well as the first of the 21^st.  It is the last of the 20^th century because it is the last to be dominated by the century’s most important technology: Television.  London is also the first 21^st century Olympics as it is the first one where the audience has talked back to the organisers and their broadcaster partner proxies. Come Rio in 2016, the Olympics is likely be a very different spectator sport thanks to social media, the power of the Internet and a global movement for more audience power. 

The professional Olympics are huge money and have become partly slave to its sponsors who take ridiculous steps to ward off ambush marketing.  However in London as in previous Olympics, most of the shots are called by the television companies who broadcast the games. They pay an extraordinary amount of money to the International Olympics Committee and local Olympic Committees for the rights.  In America, the largest of the old-style TV hegemonies NBC has had the rights to the summer and winter Olympics since 1988. Four years ago they paid the AOC and IOC $2.2 billion for the Vancouver 2010 and London 2012. NBC made the London Games the most-watched Olympics ever by tape-delaying marquee events to air in US prime time, maximising viewers and advertising dollars. 

Yet they are likely to lose money despite the large audience they have congregated for advertisers.  NBC lost $223 million on Vancouver. It was on tape delay despite being in the same timezone as LA. This allowed NBC to maximise ads but it frustrated audiences who for the first time were seeing results in real time through the Internet and social media. For the TV companies who had the content but who could no longer control the message, these external forces had become,as Jeff Jarvis called them, a "gigantic spoiler machine".

The spoiler machine has been on overdrive in the 2012 Olympics. London is four hours east of the US east coast and also on tape delay and the response has been overwhelmingly negative. NBC refused to show the opening ceremony in real time because it was “too complicated to watch”. An NBC statement defended the indefensible thus: “They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large prime-time audiences that gather together to watch them. We will be providing clips and highlights of each ceremony online so viewers know what to look forward to in primetime on NBC.”

But when it got to actual competition, the “award-winning production team” stuffed up again. They advertised an interview with swimming champion Missy Franklin before showing her gold medal-winning race. These abject failures and others led to Steven Marx creating the “nbcfail” hashtag which went berserk.  But it was UK Independent LA-based journalist Guy Adams who led the most high profile attack with a series of criticisms online which eventually saw NBC call in favours at Twitter to suspend his account. 

Adams had tweeted the email address of an NBC executive in charge of Olympics coverage, when he was upset over the quality of that coverage, encouraging others upset to contact the executive.  “The man responsible for NBC pretending the Olympics haven't started yet is Gary Zenkel. Tell him what u think! Email: Gary.zenkel@nbcuni.com.

 

Twitter claimed this breached their guidelines as it contained Zenkel’s email. Adams retorted Zenkel’s corporate email address was widely available.  The response to the ban was scathing. Novelist Irvine Welsh said the ban illustrated three tendencies of hegemonic power “1) hates criticism, 2) takes itself seriously 3) no sense of fun.”

NBC Sports Chairman Mark Lazarus claimed they understood the problem but his words betrayed they hadn’t. “We listen. We read. We understand there are people that don't like what we are doing, but we think that is a very loud minority and the silent majority has been with us for the first six days," Lazarus said.  Well of course the “silent majority” have been with NBC for a week because they have no choice if they want to watch the Olympics. Silence is not assent. Not everyone took to Twitter or Facebook to complain but as they realise they can, more will.

As in drugs, the technology to beat the TV companies is changing quickly. The BBC offers a comprehensive ad-free service of the Games courtesy of British TV licence holders and the British taxpayer.  On the Internet they use “geoblocking” based on IP address to ensure only British audiences can view the content.  But just as the Chinese get around geo-blocking to access banned political sites, anyone across the world can view the BBC content by masking their IP address using a virtual private network.  As Melbourne's Monash University copyright law teacher Rebecca Giblin said broadcast television is a dying industry. As growing number of people are no longer willing to watch TV on someone else's schedule," Giblin said. "They want to watch it on their own terms when and where it's convenient for them."

With the US delaying the opening ceremony, dodgy sites like VIPBox.TV sprung up to fill the void.  It provides high quality live content at a price. As Mashable noted,  VIPBox.TV wanted to install a proprietary MPlayer on your computer “which comes with a bunch of crapware that you will want to decline, and it is one of those sites that can turn into a bit of a pop-up monster.” VIPBox.TV are the bootleggers of the 21st century. They flourish only because of prohibition.

 

Author, editor and futurist Jeff Jarvis said NBCFail showed how the people formerly known as the audience have found a voice to complain about the time-shifting “We in the U.S. are being robbed of the opportunity to share a common experience with the world in a way that was never before possible,” Jarvis said.  He said the argument that the time-shifting was done to make more money does not stand up. Instead it should have super-served its audience by giving them what they want rather than what Mark Lazarus and Gary Zenkel thought they wanted. “I ask you to imagine what Olympics coverage would look like if Google had acquired the rights,” Jarvis said “It would give us what we want and make billions, I’ll bet."

The Courier-Mail and the 1971 Brisbane Springbok riot

Today’s Courier-Mail has a front page splash that purports to tell the “real story behind a Queensland political myth”. The article is about former premier Peter Beattie’s involvement in the 1971 Springbok tour riot in Brisbane and a vintage picture of the former Premier complete with impressive 70s style moustache adorns the front page. The article is based on a newly released police dossier which the Courier-Mail trumpets as “Forty years on, the facts come out”.

The bland inside headline of “Two sides to every story” hides far more than it reveals. With Beattie among 400 protesters facing off against 500 police there were at least 900 sides to this story, not to mention the important parts played by politicians, the unions and the media, of which the Courier-Mail was the most craven example. Given the subsequent revelations about Queensland’s police corruption and their role in the brutal repression of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era with the complicity of the media, a 64-page police dossier from the time is hardly to be trusted as an independent verification of what happened. Nor is today’s article the first time “the facts” have come out about the 1971 riot.

The best story of what happened when the white South African rugby team came to Brisbane during the Apartheid era was told in 2004 by Raymond Evans' “Springbok Tour Confrontation”, a chapter in Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (edited by Evans and Carole Ferrier).

Evans began his account with an ABC audio tape of Sounds of the Seventies. Protesters and foreign journalists (the local ones at the Courier-Mail stayed on the police side of the line) recounted events with fear audible in their voices. “[The police] just chased us with a big grin on their faces,” said one. “When people got to the bottom of the hill, they realised they had been trapped. I think that’s when they started to be brutal,” said another.

The voices were describing the events of the cold winter’s night of Thursday, 22 July 1971. The Springbok tour party was staying at the Tower Mill Motel on Brisbane’s Wickham Terrace. They were separated from the 400 protesters by a line of 500 quasi-military style police officers. The protest turnout was poorer than expected partly because of the police intimidation and partly because Brisbanites bought the official line “sport and politics should not mix”.

That this cliché was an easily exposed fiction did not matter - the media did not expose it. Both federal and state political leaders were quick to use the tour to bolster their faltering credentials. Fast-fading Liberal PM Billy McMahon provided RAAF transport after civilian carriers refused to carry the Springboks. He also opened up Enoggera Barracks to house the additional police Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen called in.

But while the Springboks did not save the PM, it amply served the Premier. Joh was in the job less than 2 years and still untested when he began to try out anti-democratic practices which became familiar in the next 16 years. Eight days before the game, he declared a State of Emergency to secure the Exhibition Grounds, suspending civil liberties for a month in the process. The legislation gave police carte blanche to treat protesters as they liked. The day before the Mill protest, 200 students marched to the city centre. 36 were arrested as police applied excessive force. TV cameramen and press photographers were also hassled by police and had their film confiscated.

Trade unionists kept out of the protests believing the convenient lie about sport and politics. But unions had make life awkward for Joh in the lead-up. The game had to be played at the Exhibition Grounds because BWIU unionists blackbanned essential plumbing works at the Ballymore rugby ground. The BWIU also halted the production of police batons and the AMIEU stopped the transport of police horses to the demonstration. But on the night of the protest, most sports-loving unionists stayed away from Tower Mill. It was students like Beattie who filled the police cells that night. It was easier to demonise the students in the media as hippies and long-haired layabouts. The other major protesters were Aboriginals who paralleled South Africa with Queensland. This was a truth the media could also ignore. After all, weren't Queensland's Aboriginals, as Joh said, "living on clover"?

The numbers of students, aboriginals and academics outside the Mill was swollen by plain clothes police who acted as agent provocateurs. With no warning, the line of uniformed police marched forward and ordered the protesters to clear the footpath. The demonstrators were forced to flee down the steep and pitch-dark hill into Wickham Park. The police attacked with fists, batons and boots as plain-clothes colleagues joined in. Some protesters escaped by jumping an eight metre high embankment into the busy traffic of Albert Street below. Some were simply thrown over.

Others still, including Beattie, sought sanctuary in the nearby Trades Hall building near Jacob's Ladder (now demolished to make way for the IBM building). One unionist saw a girl held and punched by police while a youth (later identified as Beattie) was also jumped on and held to the floor. Two of the three police attacking him were forcibly ejected from the building and the third became frightened when he realised he was alone. The last policeman, Lindsay Daniels left the injured Beattie alone and became quiet. He was wearing two different police numbers at least one of which was wrenched off by students who now greatly outnumbered him.

Outside, 50 police attempted to gain entry to the building. When ambulance officers were allowed admission, police followed them in and were restrained only because they were accompanied by an inspector. Beattie was taken under armed guard to the orthopaedic ward of the Royal Brisbane Hospital for observation of suspected spinal injuries. According to the Courier-Mail report, two doctors told police no excessive force was used in the attack.

According to another report years later quoted by Evans, Beattie said he was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest though he was the one assaulted. “I will never forgive or forget what happened next,” Beattie said. “I was verballed by the police who manufactured the most incredible statements about the whole thing.” Beattie was later released on bail and police never pressed charges.

The day after, angry students at the University of Queensland held a political strike. That night protesters significantly outnumbered police at the Mill and officers refrained from repeating their tactics from the night before. The day after was the Saturday of the game. Just 6,000 attended instead of the anticipated 30,000 full house. With the Oval ringed by barbed wire, protesters demonstrated in nearby Victoria Park instead. 2,000 people turned up faced by 900 police. Led by Labor Senator George Georges, marchers went down Fortitude Valley and into the city conducting the first sit-in at Queen Street. Violence was minimal during the day as Labor MP Bill Hayden urged caution. But the peace did not last.

After some outbreaks of violence in the city, a thousand gathered once more at the Mill that evening. Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod commanded his men to drive the protesters down into the park once more. Whitrod, who was inside the motel, claimed the police charge was in response to a rock thrown into a motel window. The offending missile was never produced and glaziers called to fix the window insisted the fall of the glass suggested it was broken from inside. But with country officers present threatening a no confidence motion in Whitrod’s “soft handling" of demonstrators, he was determined to act tough. He was supported by Joh who wanted to “stop all this business of going soft on all these demonstrations” because he could see it “leading to complete anarchy”.

The only anarchy in town that weekend was caused by rampaging police officers sanctioned by the Government while the Courier-Mail looked the other way. 40 years on, the paper is as cowardly as ever, preferring to concentrate on the irrelevant issue of whether Beattie called the police “pigs” rather than question the nature of the assault. The Springbok riot set the template for one and half decades of police brutality and corruption sanctioned by an undemocratic Premier who could hose down a meek press simply by “feeding the chooks”.

The reign in Spain is mainly plain

And so a World Cup that began as African, and then turned South American before becoming European ended up as Spanish in a tense but always absorbing final overnight in Johannesburg. Nelson Mandela delighted fans by turning up but not as much as Barcelona midfielder Andres Iniestra did by scoring the game’s only goal deep into extra time consigning the Dutch to their third final defeat.

One punter on Twitter said after the game a Dutch victory would have been a Scorsese award: given purely for their work in the 1970s – this is a little unfair on Martin Scorsese whose more recent films Gangs of New York and The Departed are on a par with anything he did in his earlier career but the point is well made nonetheless.

Holland (never the more geographical correct Netherlands) were the great side of the 1970s with Johan Cruyff at the centre of most of their brilliance. But they never won anything at national level being undone by their own arrogance in 1974, 1976 and 1978 losing to the hosts and winners of the tournament each time. 1978 was a particularly tragedy when Cruyff decided for political reasons not to go to Argentina. What better rebuff to the junta generals would have been for him to lift the trophy in front of them.

The defeat of the current Dutch crop is no tragedy, being nowhere near as good as the total football side of the 1970s. The current vintage is a competent if workmanlike team epitomised by the starring role of Liverpool’s much maligned workhorse Dirk Kuyt. They beat Brazil which was perhaps the biggest shock of the entire World Cup. But otherwise they were like Brazil’s 2006 conquerors France, tough to beat and lucky but not worldbeaters themselves.

And in terms of sporting disappointment, they are only the second best of the month compared to unknown Frenchman Nicolas Mahut who lost his Wimbledon tennis match to equally obscure American John Isner in a record breaking three-day 11-hour contest 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (7-9), 7-6 (7-3), 70-68. I can’t begin to imagine how Mahut felt at the end of that final 183rd game after they shared almost a thousand points between them.

But even Wimbledon reminds us of the World Cup with a Spaniard Rafael Nadal carrying off his second crown. His fellow countrymen – and they are countrymen, despites their catalogue of Catalans - one nilled their way to the World Cup final and repeated the dose one last time to deservedly take the crown. I congratulate them on their first title, a magnificent achievement especially outside their own continent.

As convincing European Champions in 2008 they went in as the favourite side from the northern hemisphere, but few people thought they could get past Brazil or Argentina to win outside their own continent. More still (myself included, I must admit) wrote them off after their opening shock loss to unrated Switzerland. The defeat was occasion for great angst in Madrid and Barcelona yet two games later they were back on track having won the group while the Swiss packed their bags for home.

The group win was crucial. It meant they avoided Brazil in the round of 16. Instead they won a tense Iberian derby before squeezing past a Paraguay side that was just delighted to be in the quarter finals. Germany was a different kettle of pescado having thrashed Australia, England and then Argentina but Spain passed them to death to deservedly win before repeating the dose against the Dutch.

Perhaps it is appropriate that the most Africanised country in Europe (and the one closest geographically) should triumph in Africa though the players probably won’t feel that way. But this victory may do what 50 years of oppression under Franco could not: seal a farrago of nationalities into a nation. Though it was a Castilian Iker Casillas who lifted the trophy (and in the process joining Dino Zoff in the pantheon of goalkeeping greats), it was a Catalan backbone that sealed the win. And the celebrations would have been just as great in Basque Bilbao and Galician La Coruna as they were in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville. Viva Espana.

Time to ditch the Salary Cap

The fallout continues from the latest Australian rugby league salary cap breach which has seen champions Melbourne Storm hit with the largest punishment in the code’s history. The Storm were stripped of their 2007 and 2009 premierships, not allowed to compete for points this season, forced to return $1.1m in prize money and fined $500,000. Their breaches included $1.7m in salary over five years for the News Ltd owned team. News Ltd CEO John Hartigan has distanced himself from the fraud and former Club boss and now rugby Melbourne Rebels boss Brian Waldron has fallen on his sword as the supposed “architect” of the rorts. (photo:Getty)

However there are a lot of questions unanswered. As many commentators have pointed out, the case brings into question ownership of Australian sporting teams. There are also obvious conflicts of interest between News Ltd as owners and media reporting on the issue. It seems difficult to believe that senior administrators such as Hartigan are as innocent as they portray themselves especially as News have admitted it does not have a “satisfactory explanation” as to what the players’ agents knew and when.

But questions much also be asked about the efficacy of the salary cap system itself. None of this would have occurred if there was no salary cap and it has been of dubious benefit in keeping the competition open and clubs from falling into financial ruin. The salary cap is an American import. In the US sports administrators first brought in salary caps in the 1980s to avoid the ruinous escalation of player salaries and competitive imbalance leading to boring games. The positives also include the ability of smaller clubs able to keep their star players.

But some experts have viewed salary caps as a collusive resort by clubs to maximise league revenues by controlling labour costs at the expense of less competitive balance within the league. Although European football also has dangers of competitive imbalance and financial instability it never followed the American example. As the University of Zurich noted in a 2008 paper, The labour relations approach employed by the hermetic American major leagues is not feasible within the European association-governed football pyramid. Another key difference is European clubs are treated as win-maximisers and not as profit-maximisers in sports economics literature: Kesenne and Jeanrenaud argue the most important divergence between the USA and Europe is that American clubs are business-type companies seeking to make profits, whereas the only aim of most European clubs so far is to be successful on the field. However in recent years UEFA and the clubs have begun exploring options due to the general perception that competitive balance in European club football is declining and a large number of clubs are accumulating ever-increasing debt.

Like European football clubs, Australian sporting clubs were also considered win-maximisers for most of their existence. Matters began to change in the late 1980s as first Australian Rules and then Rugby League began to move to national competitions. In 1987 the then Victorian Football League (renamed to AFL in 1990) brought in the cap as the Brisbane Bears and West Coast Eagles joined the competition. Up to then the biggest Melbourne clubs Carlton, Essendon and Collingwood had dominated the competition and the salary cap was seen as an equalisation policy (as well as a means of ensuring the poorer Melbourne clubs would survive in a national setting).

The then NSW Rugby League competition (renamed NRL in 1995) also brought in a salary cap in 1990 after the Brisbane Broncos, Newcastle Knights and Canberra Raiders had taken the league beyond the Sydney suburbs. Unlike the AFL however, the NRL has to deal with the problem of players leaving to play in lucrative overseas markets but the league believes this is an acceptable price to stop richer clubs dominating. The problem is, however, it does not completely stop that domination. In the last 12 years, Melbourne and Brisbane have won three times each – and it is no coincidence both clubs are owned by News Ltd.

The fact remains that in both AFL and NRL codes the history of the cap has been most honoured in the breach. The new Sydney Swans breached the VFL cap in the very first season and were fined $20,000 for doubling the cap. In NRL there have been 13 known breaches in 20 years involving multiple clubs. In AFL there have been at least 16 breaches in the 23 years of its existence and there have also been breaches in the next level down including most recently in the South Australian SANFL when Norwood was fined $50,000 and excluded for 12 months from registering any players outside its promotional boundary zone after a serious breach of the 2008 cap.

Like many good ideas, the salary cap is one prone to the law of unintended consequences. As sport becomes big business, its owners and controllers will stop at nothing to achieve success. It is all too easy to avoid scrutiny and the Storm debacle was only uncovered by accident. In my view, it is time to remove the cap. It won’t affect lower income clubs who can barely reach the cap ceilings now and it will drive more honest behaviour in the big clubs and patrons will get to judge exactly how much their stars are earning. As in every other occupation, the market should be best judge of salaries not the administrators.

Problems of Geography and Branding: Dakar in South America

The so-called Dakar Rally got off to a “symbolic start” in Buenos Aires today and for the second year in a row the event has now switched to Argentina and Chile. Quite how symbolic that was, seems to have been lost on most western media. The official symbol of the rally remains a (faceless) person in North African dress but the challenges now for the riders is the Andes not the Sahara. Given the widespread interest and money generated from the South American venue and the continued security fears of the original route, it is unlikely the rally will ever return to Africa. This is a mixed blessing. The event was often seen as a triumph of colonialism that cared little for the impact on the lands it travelled through or the faceless people. But it also was a strong boost to the economies of the likes of Mauritania, Mali and Senegal bringing in badly needed foreign revenue. And no one involved with the race sees an issue with stealing an African name for a South American context.

The idea for a race from Europe to Africa began in 1977 when French rider Thierry Sabine got lost on his motorcycle in the Libyan desert during the Abidjan-Nice rally. After being rescued from the sands he came up with the idea for a rally to cross the Sahara. The first Paris-Dakar rally started on 26 December 1978 with 175 competitors travelling across the Mediterranean and down through Algeria, Niger, Mali, Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) and ending in Senegal’s capital Dakar. The danger and exotic nature of the route meant it captured the public imagination and quickly became a household name through most of Europe.

Over the years the route varied and the number of competitors doubled and then trebled. The race went through Gaddafy’s Libya in 1989. In 1992 it went all the way to Cape Town. But that year’s race route through wartorn Chad reminded organisers that politics was never far away. It returned to Dakar in 1993 but the race ended its association with Paris in 1995 when it started from Spain. In 2000 competitors started in Dakar and drove to Egypt but terrorist threats forced them to fly over Algeria. The 2006 death of two young spectators in Guinea and Senegal drew criticism across Africa for the lack of sensitivity shown by the organisers.

In 2007 two planned stages between Nema and Timbuktu were cancelled because Mali authorities could not guarantee the safety of competitors. However, the transformation of the Dakar rally from a destination to a brand began in earnest a year later when the entire event was cancelled a day before it was due to start. On Christmas Eve 2007, a French family of five were having a picnic by the side of a road in the Southern Mauretania town of Aleg when they were attacked by gunmen. After robbing the family, the gunmen opened fire killing four and wounding the other before fleeing into neighbouring Senegal. The attacks were a rare event in Mauritania and government blamed it on a terrorist sleeper cell from Algerian Al Qaeda.

When the organisers of the rally sent team to examine conditions on the ground in Mauritania, they found out that three soldiers had been killed in an ambush in the north of the country on the day they arrived. Nevertheless the French director of the rally Étienne Lavigne said the deaths would not affect the running of the race. Lavigne decided to scrap the two Mali legs again but both he and Mauritanian Interior Minister Yall Zakaria said all other necessary precautions had been taken and security was on track including a 3,000 man security force. But on 29 December Al Qaeda used a website to criticise Mauritania's government for "providing suitable environments to the infidels for the rally." While it did not directly call for attacks on the race or its participants, it was enough to spook Lavigne. He called off the race a day before it was due to start on 5 January 2008.

The Mauritanian president complained that the cancellation was an overreaction. But white western lives always take priority over black African ones and there was no real criticism of the cancellation in western media other than to over-dramatically refer to it as a “death sentence” for the event. But what the media were not taking into account was that the Dakar was now a lucrative brand that could easily be de-coupled from its African location. Other countries in Europe and South America queued up to offer their services to host the event and Argentina and Chile won the rights to host it in 2009. There was little doubt that they would win it again this year. Dominique Serieys, head of Mitsubishi Motorsport saw it purely in sporting terms. "It was necessary to take a break in Africa given the geopolitical context there,” he said. “The fact the resumption is on a new continent is good news."

Serieys is right from a motoring perspective and a race of cars, trucks, motorbikes and quads across the rugged terrain of the Andes will be enjoyable for fans. It may even be more difficult than the Sahara in parts. But this hardly makes it a “Dakar Rally”. The race was born of Sabine’s vision of a trek across the sands of the Sahara and while it did not always (or even often) have the interests of Africans in mind, at least it was a rare opportunity for Africa to star on the world stage. The ease of which the race left Africa and the theft of its name are a shameful reminder of the cravenness of western interests ahead of the Third World.

This Sporting Life: Crawford Report exposes Australia’s Olympic scam

A new report into Australian sport has blasted the idiotic obsession with the Olympic medal count and said it has not resulted in improvements at grassroots level or done enough to combat obesity. The Independent Sports Panel presented The Future of Australian Sport to the Minister of Sport Kate Ellis today to a predictable backlash from the vested interest of Australian Olympic Commission head John Coates. The Crawford report (named for its chair businessman David Crawford) dismissed the AOC call for an extra $100 million to ensure top five status in the 2012 medal count as "not an appropriate measure of Australian performance.” Instead it calls for funding to be re-routed towards grassroots participation and recommends a reform of Australian sporting institutions. (photo credit: Will Palmer)

As Crikey notes many Olympic sports have minimal community participation compared to popular sports like netball and cricket. Yet the Olympics has been a central focus since the 1976 Montreal Games when Australia came away without a single gold medal. Most of the 2007 $90 million federal sports budget was spent on Olympic events. But the Crawford Report says there is so little accounting or accountability in Australian sport that it is impossible to say how much is spent, and to what effect.

It says the only data available is 2000-2001 ABS figures which found Australia spends $2.1 billion on sport. 90 percent of this figure was spent by state and local governments for the upkeep of sporting facilities and participation. Yet there were no performance measures for community sport that matched the overblown Olympic medal count indicators. The report said elite performance in non-Olympic sports and the general health and fitness of Australians need also to be considered in determining the success of Australian sport.

A re-assessment of sporting priorities is necessary, says the report. 80 percent of the commonwealth $90m budget is spent on the Olympics. This means there are some ridiculous discrepancies. Archery gets more money than Australia’s national game of cricket. Water polo gets more money than golf, tennis and lawn bowls combined. This is particularly problematic as these three sports are considered “whole of lifetime” contributors to preventative health care.

Meanwhile the cost of Olympic medals has never been adequately scrutinised. The report estimated each gold medal costs about $15 million with another $4 million for each silver and bronze. Yet there is no evidence that the Olympics lead to higher sports participation. The cost of medals is only likely to increase as other countries invest heavily in their own Olympic programs, often based on Australia’s own successful Institute of Sport model.

The AOC has requested an additional $100 million in funding to maintain Australia’s “top five” medal status. But the stupidity of this target is reflected in the medal discrepancies that favour individual events rather than team events. For instance, there are just two golds in hockey and basketball, but there are 16 in canoe/kayaking. Yet it is the team sports that are far more important to society as a whole. “If we are truly interested in a preventative health agenda through sport,” said the report, “then much of [the federal sports budget] may be better spent on lifetime participants than almost all on a small group of elite athletes who will perform at that level for just a few years.”

The Crawford Report was correct in suggesting Olympic spending was an outrageous waste of money purely to assuage the country’s international inferiority complex. And if there was any doubt the report was correct, it was removed by Coates himself with his nonsensical description that “it was un-Australian to settle for second best”. Coates called the report “disrespectful” and claimed Olympic funding was “vitally important to the nation”. He could, of course, offer no proof why this was so important other than to keep his own gravy train running. Crawford is correct; it is time to ditch the stupid fascination with the television news-friendly medal counts – they do little more than give the nation a few moments of vicarious pride every four years. It is time to better spend the money on the work-a-day sports that get people out of their armchairs for more than just a cheer.

Setanta’s little helper: The rise and fall of a satellite broadcaster

My initial reaction was to laugh on hearing Irish pay television operator Setanta was in trouble. After all “Satan-ta”, as I preferred to call them made me pay for sporting content I used to watch for free. In the late 1990s, football games such as Ireland’s world cup qualifiers and Old Firm derbies were suddenly hoovered up by a company that knew they had a captive audience of football-starved Irish and Scots in Australia and made them pay through the nose to watch them. They made a lot of money out of it as the only way of following the games was either Setanta’s way or the information superhighway. So when I heard they were on the verge of bankruptcy this week, my first reaction was “good riddance”. But I was wrong.

Setanta fill a niche. It’s not their fault that greedy game rights owners decided they could get better deals for their products with the television networks. The founders of Setanta realised long ago that there was a gap in the market that they could fill. Two young Dubliners in London, Michael O'Rourke and Leonard Ryan, got into the game back in 1990 when they filled a gap on British television. Ireland were playing a crucial game in their first World Cup against the Ruud Gullit-led Netherlands in which both sides needed to get a result.

But the thousands of Irish fans in England had no way of watching the game. England were in the same group and playing at the same time. Both the BBC and ITV refused to show Ireland’s game. So O’Rourke and Ryan bought the rights to the game cheaply and charged west London dance hall patrons £10 to watch. The pair broke even after 1,000 Irish fans turned up.

The experience made them realise there was money to be made from the Irish Diaspora. O’Rourke and Ryan spent the next 10 years slowly buying rights for sports fans living away from home, developing niche channels in Britain, America and Australia. Ryan called the early days a “fight to stay alive”. Their clients were Irish bars in San Francisco and Sydney to whom they sold All-Irelands, Six Nations rugby and Irish football internationals.

In 2005 they made their first major breakthrough in Britain by buying the rights to the Scottish Premier League. It then struck south of the border by launching a successful joint bid with ITV to get the rights to FA Cup matches and England internationals for four years from 2008, effectively knocking out all of the BBC’s live football in the process. Setanta also won a three-year contract to show live Premier League games. Suddenly Setanta was second only to Murdoch’s Sky Sports in the UK. By 2007 another Murdoch outlet, The Times, was saying the pair were worth £35m each.

But the Australian media magnate was not taking the cheeky Irish challenge for granted. Sky had the monopoly on the Premier League since its inception and did not take kindly to the EU competition ruling in 2006 that insisted it be broken up into six television packages and no one company could have all six. Setanta won two packages giving it the right to broadcast 46 live games every season. But when the packages were rebid earlier this year, Sky upped the ante and won five out of the six for 2010/2011 onwards. In the middle of a global recession, Setanta suddenly had just 23 expensive games a year and Sky had ensured the Irish company were left with the least attractive games. It also had 1.2 million customers when it needed 1.9 million to break even. It didn’t help Setanta were shortly due to pay the English Premier League £30m. They also missed a £3m payment to the Scottish Premier League last week. The knives were out.

On Wednesday Setanta were forced to post a message on its website telling customers that it is not accepting new customers as it "attempts to secure the future of the business". On the table are a range of options, including spinning off its profitable US and Irish subsidiaries. They need additional capital of about £100m to plug the funding gap. But its City backers including private equity houses Doughty Hanson and Balderton, have refused to make more than £50m available.

Setanta is now looking for other companies to buy into it and has held talks with BT and ESPN. At the moment, ESPN is officially ruling itself out as a potential buyer. However this is likely to just be a bargaining position as the American cash rich sportscaster is keen to expand its UK sports portfolio. ESPN also bid for the English Premier League rights beyond 2010 but lost out to Setanta and Sky. If Setanta does default, the Premier League rights will revert to the holders who will try to find other buyers. ESPN is owned by Disney which is an even larger media company than Murdoch’s. Their actions may be well worth watching in the next few weeks as the big guns fight over the likely corpse of an Irish player that got too big for its boots.

Urn's turn to tour

The Adelaide test between Australia and England remains delicately poised after day three. England are making a decent fist of Adelaide after its heavy defeat in Brisbane but need early wickets tomorrow if they are force a win. Australia despite being well behind may declare early in a gamble to win the game. The English are 1-0 down in the defence of the Ashes. Both sides are putting in an enormous amount of effort for a tiny urn. Some of the blame for this has to go back to John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset. It was he who started cricket’s first international tour as far back as 1789. But Sackville’s choice of location was flawed. France in 1789 was otherwise engaged in Revolution. Sackville only made it as far as Dover.

In the new century that followed teams did get together and call themselves “England”. But it wasn’t until 70 years after Sackville that an England XI finally toured abroad. North America was the destination and George Parr, the “Lion of the North”, led the tour. In the choppy waters of the Atlantic Parr showed he was no sea-lion. He frequently had recourse to gin and water to settle his nerves during heavy weather. Among the other players was fellow bowler John Wisden, who would later found cricket's bible, the Wisden Almanac. The Montreal Cricket Club sponsored the first tour, helped by the proprietors of the St Lawrence Hotel in Montreal. The players were guaranteed 50 pounds plus expenses. The English eleven played five games, all against teams of twenty two players. This format allowed Parr to pick up the impressive figures of 16 wickets for just 25 runs in one innings. They won all their games including a game against USA XXII. The tour was a huge success and they played in front of 25,000 plus crowds in Hoboken, NJ and Philadelphia.

Two years later the colonies of Australia were ready for a cricketing visit from the homeland. The state of Victoria, newly formed from the southern rump of New South Wales, was flush with the wealth of its newfound gold reserves. In 1861 the Melbourne caterers, Spiers and Pond invited Charles Dickens to tour the country to help advertise their wares. Dickens declined the offer and Spiers and Pond desperately looked around for some other means of revenue. Spiers and Pond were the caterers at the Melbourne cricket ground and their customers argued they should invite instead an England cricket team. A mostly Surrey-based team made the long journey.

Again it was 11 men against 22 except for the first game in Melbourne where an England side just off the boat successfully bartered their opposition down to 18. That first game in the suburb of Richmond attracted 15,000 people. They easily won the first game by an innings but did lose 2 of their 12 matches. Spiers and Pond were the real winners and they made so much money from the tour that they graciously allowed the Englishmen to share half the profits from the final game. The “Lion of the North” missed this tour but was back with a stronger team two years later in 1863. This time they won all their games even adding New Zealand to the itinerary.

Nine years elapsed before Dr. W.G. Grace brought out the third touring party. Although strictly an amateur, the good doctor was so sure of his own prowess and fame that he demanded a fee of £1,500 plus expenses. But his team lost 3 games out of 15 and although still playing against 18 players, it was obvious the colonials were improving. Grace justified his match fee by leading from the front. Sometimes however, there were considerable distractions. A local journalist reported from Ballarat, ‘The sun shone infernally, the eleven scored tremendously, we fielded abominably, and all drank excessively’.

Four years on in 1876, the first fully-professional English team came to Australia and established the modern pattern for the tour. The highlight of this tour was to be two games against a Combined Australia XI. These two games later became recognised as the first two Tests. Without Grace, this England team was beatable. And in the first test in March 1877 at the MCG, the Australians won by 45 runs. The English captain James Lillywhite was magnanimous in defeat, saying, "The win was...a feather in their cap and a distinction that no Englishman will begrudge them". The local press went berserk but it received no coverage in the Mother Country. The English gained revenge to win the second test.

An Australian team travelled without success in 1880 but returned again to play one test at the Kennington Oval in London in 1882. But the Australians were well prepared. It was the 29th game of the tour of which they had only lost two games. Fred Spofforth known as the Demon took 14 English wickets for 90 runs. In a low scoring test, Australia won by seven runs in under two days. This defeat did grab press attention. The day after the end of the test was Saturday, September 2nd. On that date the Sporting Times carried the famous mock obituary for English cricket - an epitaph that lingers to this day and ensures posterity for the journalist Reginald Shirley Watkinshaw Brooks.
In Affectionate Remembrance
of
E N G L I S H C R I C K E T,
which died at the Oval
on
29th A U G U S T, 1882,
Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances
R.I.P.
N.B. - The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.

The Nota Bene at the end of Brook’s obituary would give the obituary continuity and ensure that the name stuck. But it needed one further moment of theatre for it to become the label for one of the longest-standing sporting contents in the world. A few weeks later, an English team, captained by Ivo Bligh set off to tour Australia. The side lost the first of three but won the next two to win the series. The result prompted a group of Melbourne ladies to burn one of the bails used in the Third Test, put it a small brown urn, and present it to Bligh. Bligh took the urn back to England. But he also took back one of the Melbourne ladies who burned the bails. In February 1884, Bligh married Miss Florence Rose Morphy of Melbourne. Forty-three years later it was she who bequeathed the Ashes to MCC on the death of her husband.

The urn has stayed in London ever since, regardless of which side subsequently “won the Ashes”. Until 2006 that is. MCC had hoped the urn could return to Australia in 2003 but an X-ray taken at the time revealed several serious cracks, notably in the stem. The urn was repaired and now for the first time since Miss Morphy and her friends burned it, the urn itself is now on tour with the players. At the moment the urn is with the South Australian Museum. The museum hopes that as many as 10,000 people will view what is now cricket's “holy grail” in its 11 day stay.

Tour de France starts with another drug scandal

A major doping scandal in Madrid has thrown the 2006 Tour de France into chaos. 13 riders including three favourites Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso and Francisco Mancebo have been suspended from the race. The scandal had been bubbling since May when Spanish police raided several addresses and found large quantities of anabolic steroids, equipment used for blood transfusions and more than 100 packs of frozen blood. On Thursday this week, Spanish authorities sent race organizers a 40 page document which summarised the police investigation into the drug ring. The police concluded that the ring supplied Tour riders with banned drugs and performance-enhancing blood transfusions. The organisers took immediate action to ban the impacted teams.

Ullrich, Basso and Mancebo finished 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively in last year’s Tour. Basso has denied any wrongdoing and has said he's still determined to compete in the race. Organisers however are suggesting even more riders could be suspended, all 21 teams have decided to exclude anyone who's implicated in the doping probe - even without proof of drug taking. Allegations of doping have dogged the Tour de France since its inception in 1903. The current scandal is the biggest to hit the sport since 1998 when the entire top French team Festina was kicked out of the tour after the discovery of a large supply of drugs in a team car. The team admitted to systematic drug use under the direction of their doctors.

The Tour starts today with a prologue in the city of Strasbourg. It is the first tour of post-Lance Armstrong era. The legendary Armstrong has won the last seven tours. The last winner before him was the great mountain climber Marco Pantani “the Pirate”(so called for his bandana and aggressive riding style) who died of a cocaine overdose in 2004. The last living tour winner before Armstrong is Ullrich who won in 1997. His suspension from the race means that there are no former winners in this year’s race.

Le Tour is the world’s largest and most gruelling annual sporting event. The 2006 event now has 176 riders who will complete 3,675kms in over 20 stages (plus today’s 7km prologue) in 23 days. The event finishes on Sunday 23 July in the Champs-Élysées in the centre of Paris. The stages include two time trials and five days in the mountains. The remaining stages are held over relatively flat terrain. But it is in the Pyrenees and the Alps where the race is usually won and lost. Lance Armstrong was phenomenally strong in the mountains. In his 2004 victory, he was the first man since Italian Gino Bartali in 1948 to win three mountain consecutive stages.

The Tour started in 1903 as a publicity stunt for a newspaper called L’Auto (renamed to l'Équipe after World War II due to L'Auto links with the Vichy regime.) It was a 2,500 km race taking place across 19 days, in six stages. Riders were expected to ride day and night, and push themselves to extreme limits. Sixty riders began the race, and the winner was Maurice Garin. The race was hugely popular and succeeded wildly in its marketing goal. Circulation of L’Auto rose from 22,000 to 65,000 after the event. By 1923 they were selling half a million copies. Today, the Tour is organised by the Société du Tour de France, a subsidiary of Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), in the same media group that owns l'Équipe. The tour has taken place every year except during World Wars I and II. The race leader wears the famous maillot jaune, the yellow jersey. The colour yellow was chosen for the colour of L'Auto's newsprint. There are also a green jersey (for sprint points) and the polka dot jersey (for the “king of the mountains”.) Drug allegations have plagued the event almost since day one. Early riders used alcohol or ether to dull the pain. Amphetamines became popular after the war and in 1967 it killed British cyclist Tom Simpson who died while climbing Mont Ventoux. In 2005 seven-time winner Lance Armstrong was accused by l'Équipe of using EPO. He was subsequently cleared by a doping tribunal.

Armstrong is a legend in the sport and has won more Tours than anyone else. Born in 1971 in Plano, Texas, he excelled as a triathlete in his teenage years. He became a professional cyclist aged 16 and was US National champion four years later. By 1996, he had risen to number 1 in the world rankings with a world championship and several stage victories in the Tour de France under his belt. But in October that year his career was rocked by the discovery of testicular cancer. He was told he only had a 50:50 chance of survival. He started aggressive chemotherapy and made a spectacular recovery. By 1999 he was back in the Tour, which was a victory in itself. But he went on to win the prologue before going all the way to win the race. That was the start of the "Tour de Lance" period which saw him add another six titles. Two more Americans are among the favourites for 2006 Floyd Landis and Levi Leipheimer as well as the Spaniard Alejandro Valverde. But the withdrawals have made the Tour wide open.

The only certainty is that the cycling world will be hailing a new hero in three weeks time in Paris.