It’s true what they say – people only want what they can’t have. Never did I believe I’d covet toilet roll, scour the internet for penne pasta or sigh in relief at the sight of fresh fruit and vegetables in the local supermarket. The emergence and gradual rise to prominence of Covid-19 has changed the game, perhaps forever. Simple life pleasure have transformed from pub trips on a Friday to taking the recycling bin out and feeling the sun on my face. The aspects of my everyday that used to excite – such as sport – now feel like a distant memory.
In times of public crisis, sport seems to be the first thing people forget about. In reality, it is the literal definition of liberalism – the ability to compete, enjoy, practice freely, without prejudice or bias. In Western society, we place extraordinary value in the importance of sport – one need only look at the exorbitant world of Premier League football to understand how crucial it can be to so many people.
A global disaster renders sport the forgotten man. Make no mistake – Covid-19 is an emergency of unrecognisable scale and severity. No country is unaffected and no person immune – it represents an invasive threat to our social values, our economic practices and the liberties we regularly take for granted.
So it seems only logical that sport take a backseat. The media is flooded with images of exhausted doctors, under-resourced nurses, spent politicians and resigned medical experts, preaching the importance of social distancing and forecasting future gloom if we do not comply.
But isn’t that exactly why sport is so important? In its purest, unadulterated form, sport is a distraction from a monotonous everyday melody. Sport is unscripted, unencumbered, untainted largely by the politics that dictate the mechanisms of modern life. It speak volumes that so many didn’t realise how highly they valued sport, until it was whipped away.
This should in no way demean or discredit the current situation. Sport has to become secondary, when our collective national and global effort is focused on eliminating the greatest health threat since the turn of the century. The work that our essential services are carrying out deserves air-time forever – they are the pillars of society, so often underappreciated, that mean the rest of us can sleep, eat, live freely and without particular burden.
And that’s why sport is so often what we return to, as our distraction. Perhaps it is time for us to own the fact that we’ve buried our heads in the sand and used sport, among other things, to hide the fundamental flaws in our society. Sport has become vast and swollen, a staple in so many households and an intrinsic bond for so many families.
It’s an escape though, a way to really lose ourselves in the ebb and flow of events outside our control. To sit, utterly captivated by the twisting, turning narrative of a story untold but whose pages are being written before our very eyes. Take that joy away and I believe the values of a life we hold dear diminish, just ever so slightly.
Can we practically endorse the continuation of sport at the current time? Unequivocally, no. We must all band together, virtually in this most unusual of times, to heed government advice and contain, delay and eventually halt the spread of this evil virus.
But without guilt we should be able to miss losing ourselves on a whim; taking a boat out on a cool Saturday morning; jogging alone through twilight fields; applying rubber to tarmac for unending miles and memories.
And it will return soon. Sport is immune to crisis in that it, in some form, always exists. The emotion it generates isn’t gone and the qualities it exhorts aren’t buried – it is this certainty, this will to return to normal that should carry us over this wave to shore. We’ll be back to whinging, whining, complaining and crying about things that don’t really matter before long.
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