An initiative by six of the world’s leading sports newspapers is timely and welcome, says Alex Wade.
This Saturday is a red letter day for armchair sports haters. To their delight, amid their varying poses of idleness (for how else does a sports hater pose?), the Financial Times will henceforth abandon its sports coverage. No doubt the credit crunch has played a significant part in this decision, with the FT opting to concentrate on its core brand value as the financial paper of record instead of who might win the Premier League or which racing driver is likely to set the pace in the looming Formula 1 season.
But has the FT missed a trick? Rumours of sport’s demise at the pink ‘un are evidently well founded, but elsewhere, sports coverage is flourishing, from the humble back pages to The Times’ much respected supplement, The Game, not to mention The Observer’s excellent Sport Monthly. Moreover, on the continent six of the world’s leading sports newspapers have, in rather Web 2.0 fashion, formed an alliance to “defend and promote the interests and freedom of the sports press.” Their new organisation is called, not all that imaginatively, the International Association of Sports Newspapers (IASN).
The founding members of the IASN are the Italian sports daily La Gazzetta dello Sport, El Mundo Deportivo and Marca in Spain, L’Equipe in France, Olé in Argentina, and Lance in Brazil. The IASN’s motto is “Sports press for sports in society”, its secretariat is based in Paris and its first President is Santi Nolla, editor of El Mundo Deportivo.
What, though, will the IASN actually do? Well, according to a report from the World Association of Newspapers, its aims are to “promote the role of sports newspapers as a marketing tool for the brands associated with sport; promote sports and reading among children; encourage volunteerism in the sporting world; fight against racism and xenophobia in sport; promote the use of sport as a tool in development policies; and safeguard the ethical and economic interests of sports newspapers.”
All of which is laudable per se, but yet more so, perhaps, as the recession now billed as “the worst for 100 years” bites with ever greater ferocity. It may sound counter-intuitive, but far from being a mere diversion the values of sport are precisely those that will enable people and businesses to survive.
Sport is a microcosm of the competitive world in which we live and work. Sporting success is only achieved by hard work, training, commitment and playing by the rules. Talent is undoubtedly required, but so, too, among true sportsmen, the ability to bring out the best in colleagues with lesser gifts. Moreover, sport has no regard for barriers of race and class; it is democratic to its core.
Excesses exist. No one can condone the absurd salaries paid to Premier League footballers, and in a world threatened by global warming, the Formula 1 circus seems increasingly antediluvian. An unchecked market, in sport, may yet prove as disastrous as a pyramid scheme created by Bernie Madoff. But for all that it has its problems, sport remains an environment in which talent will out, where dedication pays off, and where no one likes a cheat.
The formation of IASN is, therefore, a welcome development in a contracting newspaper industry. Its founder members, and, perhaps, any other newspaper contemplating shedding its sports coverage, might like to recall the words of ‘Gentleman’ Jim Corbett, the great heavyweight boxer of the late 1800s:
Fight one more round, when your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round, when your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black and you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you one on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round – remembering that the man who always fights one more round is never whipped.
Image courtesy of Corbis.
- Written by admin
- Filed under Communication
- Leave a comment
