Will sport turning its back on Russia help?
Well it surely can't make things worse. PLUS: CTE, The BYC and the return of MBC (with a difference)
The biggest story in the sporting world is really not a sports story at all. It would, nevertheless, be defeatist to suggest that Big Sport doesn’t have a role to play in turning Russia into a pariah state.
Sporting sanctions against Apartheid-era South Africa were as effective as any other form of diplomatic pressure. While Vladimir Putin might be even more insulated against outside criticism than the National Party of Verwoerd, Vorster and Botha was, there are many powerful, wealthy and influential Russians who use sport to legitimise their existence.
Roman Abramovich (Chelsea), Mikh
ail Prokhorov (Brooklyn Nets) and Alisher Usmanov (Arsenal), anyone?
Putin himself has used the staging of huge sports events like the Winter Olymnpics and Fifa World Cup to demonstrate that Russia is a progressive country open for business with the west.
Sporting isolation might not land a crippling blow like economic sanctions, but it will hurt. Russia takes enormous pride in their sports systems (so much so they feel compelled to cheat to demonstrate their athletic superiority).
They will not enjoy being on the outside looking in.
This piece by the BBC breaks down what many of the world’s major sporting administrative bodies have done in regards to Russia. It’s a handy document.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/60568139
There’s a shocking story attracting headlines in Australia that really doesn’t shock me one bit.
A study of 21 brains donated to the national brain bank found that 12 had CTE lesions and all but one was showing signs of neurodegeneration. The 21 donors had played sports with risks of repetitive head trauma, 17 of them in the three major oval-ball codes.
Alarmingly, three of the donors were under 35 and six of the 12 with CTE had died at their own hands.
The biggest takeaway from what is an inherently biased study - the brains were donated because the families of the subjects and in many cases the subjects themselves knew there was something wrong with them - is that CTE is a risk for Australian athletes, especially those in contact sports.
It might sound self-evident but you don’t have to go too far to find people who’ll tell you it’s a mainly US problem because of the way American football is played, the helmet-to-helmet clashes et cetera.
It’s not. It’s a problem for any sport where the head is subject to repeated concussive and subconcussive blows.
New Zealand has its own brain bank but the last time I checked in they were struggling to get pledges, which might say something about our national character: when it comes to potentially bad news, we’d rather just not know.
Baseball is in many ways a sport stuck in a timewarp, unable to keep up with the cool kids in the NBA and NFL in particular.
With 81 home games for each club per season, lucrative TV rights deals about to be re-negotiated and a proposal for expanded playoffs, owning a club is still a licence to print money.
How that money is distributed, however, is causing a big rift between the league (the owners) and the players, who have one of the strongest, most unbreakable unions in American life.
Unable to negotiate a deal, the owners have now locked the players out of the clubs (a reverse strike if you will), and the start of the season has been cancelled, with the potential for this to drag on.
If you like a good story at the intersection of sport and business, this is one to get stuck into.
THE BYC
We got a bit of phlegm off our collective chests when discussing the sorry end to the Black Caps test summer. In the long run, as Nick Lowe would say in this criminally underrated, masterful pop video, you have to be cruel to be kind.
MIDWEEK BOOK CLUB
What is it? Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty1
Who wrote it? Patrick Radden Keefe
Publisher: Doubleday
Genre: Narrative reporting
Reviewer: Stuart Bremner
You might not have heard of the Sackler family, nor noticed their philanthropic contributions as you wandered in pre-Covid times around the British Museum, the New York Museum of Art or the Louvre, but they are one of the richest families in the world.
They have a dark secret. Outside of Medellin or Sinaloa, they are one of the world’s largest drug-selling cartels. In Empire of Pain, Keefe holds them to account for the creation of the opioid crisis that’s killed more Americans than in all the US wars since hostilities ended in 1945, while enriching three generations of Sacklers by billions of dollars.
Across 440 pages (plus 60 libel-mitigating pages of references), Keefe covers the rise of the Sackler family, the greed of the and messy relations of the second and third generations and leaves us at the edge of their demise. Along the way he highlights the ineptness and inherent conflict of regulators who, after a brief interlude, join the regulated on inflated salaries and how dysfunctional families of inherited wealth and the companies they run can be.
Think Dynasty and Dallas mixed with Big Tobacco in pill form.
Like the drugs on the cover, Keefe’s style is addictive, but a word of warning: If you are an out-and-out capitalist who thinks profiting off human suffering is acceptable, steer clear of the final two-thirds of the book that increasingly focuses on how greedy, super-rich elites use philanthropy to cleanse their sins and how, in turn, we seem unable to hold them to account.
A couple of weeks ago, the opioid crisis came to sports in a big way, which inspired The Bounce’s biggest fan Bremner to write this review. If you have read or seen something you feel is worth reviewing, get in touch.
Russia's state sanctioned systematic doping programme should have been enough for a Russia-free sports zone for some years but unfortunately it takes a war to get some action from the fat cats who have benefited from cuddling up to Putin or his proxies.
Alisher Usmanov sold his 30% stake in Arsenal in 2018, so it's a falsehood to link him with the club in 2022. One of Usmanov's companies is now a shirt sponsor of Everton, main sponsor of the women's team, and another has naming rights on their training ground - if you want to accurately link him to the Premier League in contemporary times.