July 2007 Archives

Sunday Herald, July 15

IT may not be the orthodox thing for a sportswriter to depart from Ernest Hemingway's precepts on the subject but here goes: the running of the bulls in Pamplona is quite the stupidest activity to be allowed in the name of sport in the civilised world.

I say this not from any standpoint of squeamish vegetarianism, strident activism or mere timidity. No, man is top of the food chain and long may he remain so but do we have to rub the blighters' faces in it? I am reminded of the time a friend was accosted by a student with a clipboard on Sauchiehall Street and asked if he knew what the biggest killer in Africa happened to be. His unthinking offer of "the hippopotamus" might have betrayed an inclination for lateral thought I had not hitherto suspected in him but it also underlined the essential point that we should respect and fear, not mess with, big, dumb animals. Getting them angry and then running away is neither purposeful, sporting or manly.

That is why this week - as ever when the Basque city holds its annual eight-day gorefest - I found myself reading the newspaper reports of injuries to human thigh, neck and abdomen with a certain cheerfulness. The bulls are all killed at the end, of course, but while the match is on I'll take bovine over Spaniard any time.

Why is it that intellectuals and Hispanophiles so glorify and eulogize this bloody jubilee? All-night partying, spraying complete strangers in sangria and calimochos (cheap red wine mixed with Coke, a bit like Buckfast), running for your life and then passing out on the pavement - it's all part of the wonderful local tradition, don't you know, but if it happened here they'd be absolutely shitting themselves.

Bull-goading of one sort or another has always been how the Latin male has gotten his jollies, but the reports this week also highlighted an alarming new development, with Pamplonese women apparently desperate for their own version of the chase, only with cows instead of bulls. One aspiring Artemis was quoted as saying: "Cows, as well as bulls, have four legs and a natural instinct to run." Cows! Simple, beautiful, mild-mannered cows! Is it too much to ask that women emulate rather than eviscerate them?

ONE some time lady of Spain who possibly won't be putting the bull-running in her diary for next year is prototype wag Mrs David Beckham. In a magazine interview the couple gave this week, coincidental with their arrival in the US, where the former England captain has signed a deal with Major League Soccer club LA Galaxy, Victoria, for it is she, is quoted as saying: "I think people are really going to see me for the first time. I think they have this impression that I'm this miserable cow who doesn't smile. But I'm actually quite the opposite." Qui Loqui?

FROM Latin bull-talk to Scottish football's own bulldozer. Aberdeen manager Jimmy Calderwood, he of the penchant for ultraviolet rays, was on the rampage this week in an ongoing war of words with Scotland under-20 coach Tommy Wilson, whom he blamed for the youngsters' lousy showing at the World Cup in Canada. Calderwood, whose skin shaded from Etruscan Orange to outright Mahogany on his holidays in Spain last month, is furious that Andrew Considine, a regular feature at the heart of Aberdeen's defence last season, was altogether left out of a Scotland side that slumped to three defeats.

"Seemingly Tommy Wilson wants to be a manager in his own right one day," Calderwood fumed on Tuesday, warming to his theme with the withering reproach: "Well, I will tell you this - he had better think again as you don't get away with that behaviour at this level."

That other great icon of Scottish culture, Rab C Nesbitt, a man not unaccustomed to a few calimochos and a night on the pavement, has been off the radar for some time, possibly having disappeared to write a book on the Glasgow diet. In Calderwood he would no doubt recognise a kindred verbal stoutheartedness.

THE first time the Tour de France visited Britain was in 1974, when, perhaps still smirking with pride at their new motorway system, the brass in their wisdom decided the best way of showing off our sceptred isle was to have riders plough up and down a colourless stretch of dual carriageway near Plymouth.

Twenty years later the Tour returned and lessons seem to have been learned, the race visiting Dover, Brighton and Portsmouth and the crowds turning out in number. After a thirteen year absence from these shores, the opening time trial prologue rolls out in central London today, with Trafalgar Square, The Mall and Buckingham Palace offering a sublime stage backdrop.

Despite such grandstanding from the capital, however, attitudes towards road cycling here remain lukewarm. Since the Tour last visited British Cycling's Premier Calendar Road Race Series has much reduced in size - in Scotland alone the Glasgow to Dunoon classic has disappeared as has the Tour of the Kingdom stage race in Fife. Motorists might wail and gnash about congestion charges and speed cameras but on Britain's roads the humble cyclist is firmly fastened to the bottom of the food chain. Closing a stretch of road for half and hour to allow a cycle race through is about the height of leftie, tree-hugging madness.

When it comes to the Tour de France, it is a perennial mystery to those of us enthralled by its majesty, that Brits on the whole just don't, well, get it. For a start terrestrial TV coverage in the UK is now pretty much non-existent and it has become increasingly difficult for the novice to get a handle on the sport's many subtleties. Riders compete for themselves and a team, egad! Distances are in kilometres!

It is perhaps its refusal to dish itself up in nice bite-sized portions that makes the Tour an ill-fit with British television schedulers. Over the next three weeks, 21 teams of nine riders each will cover a total distance of 3,550km, split over 21 stages. Each stage is an individual race in itself, although stage-winners often have no chance of winning the yellow jersey, given to the rider who completes the course in the lowest time. Overall winners tend to be able to perform well in the mountains and ride time trials, of which there are three, but there are two further jerseys up for grabs - a green one for the 'King of the Mountains' and a white and red polka dot one for the top sprinter.

Yet while all these events are won by individuals, a strong Tour contender must have a strong team to shield him from the wind on flat stages, fetch him drinks and food from the team car, or ward off would-be attackers by setting a good pace in the high mountain stages. The British are said to admire a plucky loser but in the Tour de France the loser is no loser at all. The 'lantern rouge' is the rider who is last overall, but he will have suffered a great deal to complete the course and may well have sacrificed much of his energy at the service of his leader early on in the race.

All of which gets to the heart of what sets the Tour de France so utterly apart from other sporting events. The cycling supporter is as much in awe of the race itself, its promise of heroism, the ritual of man defying both geography and his own body, as he is of particular riders. And that is why, despite the doping scandals of 1998 and 2006, the Tour remains unbowed. In France, millions buy L'Equipe every day to read detailed analysis of the race and its riders. In Britain we may yet discover that bicycles aren't just for coming over all green.

This article appeared in The Herald