tim's experiment

Quite the most infuriating headline of the past week was the one that said Hong Kong “needed” 500 professional athletes. Even allowing for the fact that it was quoting a lady who worked for the Hong Kong Sports Institute this seemed a bit rich. It may well be that the HKSI needs 500 professional athletes to keep its employees in the state of secure employment to which they would like to be accustomed. But the rest of us?

The word “need”usually implies something more serious than just desirable from the point of view of the speaker. Hong Kong needs a police force and a public housing programme. Arguably it needs a high speed rail connecton and a third runway. But it does not in any useful sense of the word need full-time professional athletes at all.  Leave aside the football and rugby people who are payed for by customers who are prepared to cough up for tickets or patrons who wish to see higher standards of play. The rest of the athletic population is supported by the taxpayer, who is rarely consulted about this item of expenditure. Their only purpose, as far as the rest of us are concerned, is to make the Olympic coverage more palatable by giving us someone to root for. Since most of the population is quite happy to use the China team for this purpose we really do not need these people at all.

To be fair, I think the 500 figure was supposed to have an “if” attached to it. This was the figure which would, at least in coaching theory, allow Hong Kong to field competitive teams or competitors in all disciplines. Why Hong Kong should wish to do that was not mentioned. Clearly though this is a proposal which will be considered seriously because the sporting Functional Constituency is a useful tame vote for the government. At least the athletes, unlike the Heung Yee Kuk, do not aspire to be above the law.

They do, though, have some odd notions about education. It was suggested by the lady for whom 300 Spartans was not enough that the professional athletes should be given more time to complete their education  so that they would not suffer from taking time off school work. She thought 10 years for high school and 10 years for university would be about right.

There are some obvious problems with this suggestion. One is that few athletes will really wish to be Hong Kong’s only 21-year-old high school student. Another is that if this suggestion was implemented it would reinforce the already widespread suspicion that a lot of sportspeople are dumb. The university end of it presents less obvious difficulties. A course which is designed to take three or four years may not work over ten. Indeed the sportsperson may get to the nineth year and discover that some items he needs to graduate are no longer offered. Universities may feel that there is more to the education they offer than a gradual accumulation of credit units, and students need some experience of scholarship as a lifestyle, rather than just a mealticket.  Actually local universities are already quite willing to be flexible with sports stars, most of whom by an interesting coincidence turn out to be studying some form of sport.

I understand the frustration of professional coaches who find that promising youngsters are not prepared (or not allowed by their parents) to drop educational activity and devote themselves full-time to a sport for a while. But proposing special slow-motion degrees for this group seems to be an attempt to exempt them from one of the facts of life, which is that sometimes you have to choose from two things which are mutually exclusive. Time spent studying cannot be spent training and vice versa. This is not an absolute ban on serious sport. When I was an undergraduate I trained six days a week all the time (we were not allowed to row on Sundays) and this was allowed even though I was not studying “sports science”. Students are not condemned to sporting inactivity just because they are students. Six month training camps in the Kenyan highlands are out, though. That’s life.

There is also a question of fairness here. Professional sport is not the only pursuit which peaks early enough to clash with long-term education. Models, actors, pop singers, Miss Hong Kong contestants and even proponents of some of the more fiddly factory work need to make an early start on their careers if thay are to have one at all. Are all these people to go on the ten-year slow train to graduation? And having accepted them, can we refuse sex workers?

While we are on sporting matters, a couple of other things we do not need. Some excitement over the brief appearance of a Formula One car on a (closed to traffic) Hong Kong street led to suggestions that it would be nice if Hong Kong had its own Grand Prix. No it wouldn’t. Quite apart from the noise and the need to close roads for days (they have to practice) there is the question whether Formula One is really the sort of enterprise we ought to be encouraging. After all football is a great worldwide game with a blob of sleeze on top of it. Formula One is a small travelling circus with a blob of sleeze on top of it. It has increasingly appeared in recent years as a way of making one man very rich. There are other car sports if we want one.

Also on my “No thanks” list is the America’s Cup. I remember the days when this was a compulsive watch, in matched yachts built according to widely understood rules. Lately it has become a legal slug fest and the “boats” used are now grossly impractical contraptions which change with every iteration of the race, according to decisions made by New York judges. It seems the cup is now preparing to spin off a sort of global challenger series which will travel the world. An application to the largely unused “mega events” fund is no doubt already being drafted. Not in my harbour, thank you.