The Fifty Most Heartbreaking Moments in Sport

This month's Observer Sports Monthly, out today, features the top fifty Most Heartbreaking Moments in Sport.
Here are my two contributions: Crisp's gallant defeat by Red Rum in the 1973 Grand National (number 6) and the defeat of Hungary in the the 1954 World Cup final (number 25).
What's your most heartbreaking sporting memory?

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1981870,00.html

OSM 50 heartbreaking moments: Number 6.

Long-time leader Crisp is caught by Red Rum in the dying strides
31 March 1973, Grand National, Aintree.

Awful yet glorious: that's how Aintree historian Reg Green described the 1973 Grand National in his book A Race Apart. Even now, it's hard to think of a better description for one of the most stirring horse races of all time. Thirty-eight horses lined up at the start, but the race was a tale of just two of them, both class performers, but so different in their backgrounds. Crisp, the great Australian chaser, under champion trainer Fred Winter, shared favouritism with Red Rum, trained locally by a former taxi driver called Ginger McCain at the back of a used car lot in Southport. But although both horses started equal in the betting, they did not start on level terms in the race. Crisp, by virtue of his higher rating, had to carry top weight of 12st, a terrible burden.

Crisp showed up prominently from the start, taking a position on the inside. Jumping superbly, he took the lead at the Canal Turn and, when his nearest challenger fell at the Chair (the 15th fence), he was 25 lengths clear. 'I can't remember a horse so far ahead in the Grand National at this stage,' declared commentator Julian Wilson. By the 23rd, Crisp was a fence ahead of most of the chasing pack. But between the last two fences, jockey Richard Pitman felt his mount tiring. After jumping the last he reached for his whip. The horse did not respond. Instead, he veered left, losing around three lengths in the process. 'It was the biggest schoolboy error a jockey could make,' Pitman says now of using his whip. In fact, he had given Crisp one of the great Aintree rides.

As the horses entered the finishing straight, Red Rum, with 23lb fewer on his back, was gaining with every stride. Crisp was exhausted but tried to rally, and held on until the final few strides of the race when Red Rum passed him to record a dramatic victory, in a then record time. 'I watch it occasionally on video and one day Crisp is going to beat him,' says Ginger McCain. 'It was only bang on the line that he got there.'

I, too, watch the race occasionally and never fail to be moved by the extraordinary courage shown by both horses and their respective jockeys. It took a special horse to overhaul Crisp in 1973, a very special horse indeed, as we discovered when, 12 months later, Red Rum carried 12st to victory in the National, the knowledge of which, for those close to Crisp, probably makes his anguished and unforgettable defeat a little easier to bear.


http://observer.guardian.co.uk/osm/story/0,,1981893,00.html
OSM 50 heartbreaking moments: Number 25

Destiny slips away from the Mighty Magyars
4 July 1954, World Cup Final, Berne.

Between June 1950 and November 1955 Hungary won 43 of the 51 matches they played, including emphatic home and away victories over England, and averaged more than four goals a game. The 'Mighty Magyars' lost only one match in their incredible run. But it was the one game that mattered most: the 1954 World Cup final against West Germany.

The Hungarians had sauntered through the group stage in Switzerland with emphatic victories against South Korea (8-0) and West Germany (8-3). In the quarter-finals they beat Brazil 4-2 and dispatched reigning champions Uruguay by the same score in the semis. All looked set for Hungary's coronation in the final, especially when goals by Ferenc Puskas and Zoltan Czibor put them 2-0 up after only eight minutes, against a side they had already defeated comprehensively.

The West Germans pulled two goals back before half-time, however, and punished Hungary's profligacy in front of goal by taking the lead with six minutes to go. Puskas scored what appeared a perfectly good equaliser two minutes from time, but a Welsh linesman had other ideas and the goal was ruled out for offside.

For years afterwards, rumours persisted in Budapest of a high-level conspiracy to prevent a communist nation from winning football's greatest prize. Whatever the reason, Hungary's historic opportunity had passed and one of football's greatest teams had been deprived of the honour they deserved.

The Battle for Democracy in America

How is it that shortly after losing an election, widely regarded as a referendum on his war policy, President Bush has the temerity to try and send yet more working-class Americans to their deaths in Iraq?

The answer of course, is the disproportionate influence of the Washington War Lobby.

Is it right that a few neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute have more clout than the majority of American voters?
No, I don’t think so either.

Here’s a suggestion, from Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com on how Americans can reclaim their democracy.

In praise of Twelfth Night

Here's my piece on a sadly neglected Christmas tradition, from today's Daily Express.

Have you taken down your Christmas decorations already? If so, you are not alone.
While decorations seem to go up even earlier each year, it’s also true that that more and more Britons are packing away their trees, lights and tinsel much sooner than they used to- sometimes with a sense of relief that we can get back to business as usual.

I walked along a few streets to my local shopping centre earlier this week and was taken aback at how few decorations remained. The space in the square where a few days earlier, a beautiful Christmas tree had stood with bright, twinkling lights, was now empty. How sad. It’s not just about missing the cheery spectacle that lights and decorations provide us on a grey and miserable day. It’s also about honouring a long-standing and colourful Christmas tradition, that of Twelfth Night, which has all but disappeared.

It’s curious that retailers, given the way they have promoted other festivals, such as Valentine’s Day or Halloween to their great commercial advantage, haven’t been tempted to do the same to Twelfth Night. There might be rich pickings in it for them if they do.

Twelfth Night is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking". There are however many, including ‘The Lions Part’ (see sidebar), who hold that Twelfth Night should in fact be commemorated on 6th January, i.e. the twelfth full day after December 25th, due to the old custom of treating sunset as the beginning of the following day. However, some hold that Twelfth Night should be on January 6th- that is, the full 12th day after December 25th.

Twelfth Night marks the end of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, the length of celebration being based on a sequence of verses in The Bible (Matthew 2:1-12), and a belief that it may have taken 12 days for the Three Kings to travel to Bethlehem after first seeing the star signifying the birth of Jesus.

Those who believe that modern Christmases have degenerated into a feast of excessive eating and drinking, should consider the Bacchanalian manner in which the Twelve Days of Christmas were celebrated by our ancestors. In the Middle Ages, the festive period was one of continuous merrymaking.

In Tudor England, the celebrations were riotous. A ’Lord of Misrule’ (known as Abbot of Unreason in Scotland) , who was generally a peasant or sub-deacon, was appointed to be in charge of the revelries up to Twelfth Night. They promoted drunkenness, promiscuity and gambling. Even the sovereign had to follow his commands, however ridiculous.

Twelfth Night was considered the climax of the Christmas celebrations which the Tudors celebrated even more enthusiastically than Christmas Day itself. Everyone attended parties, in which practical jokes were played. A popular trick included hiding live birds in an empty pie-case, so that when a guest opened the crust, the birds would fly out. It was commemorated in the nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’.
The performance of plays, or ’mummings’ was also an important aspect of the celebrations. The characters, who were often masked, varied from play to play- but the hero was always St George who fights the power of evil, traditionally represented by the Turkish dragon.

William Shakespeare’s play ‘Twelfth Night‘, was written specifically for the festivities and was first performed in 1602. The play, in line with the Twelfth Night traditions of reversed roles and disguises, has a woman Viola, dressing a up a man, and a servant, Malvolio imagining that he can become a nobleman.
The festivities came to be associated with certain types of food and drink.

There was the ‘Twelfth Night Cake’, a rich and filling fruit cake which traditionally contained a bean. If you got the bean you were the King and Queen of the bean and could tell everyone else present what to do. But there were other, less desirable items in the cake as well. If you got a clove, you were a villain. If you got a twig, you were a fool. And if you got a rag, you were a ‘tarty’ woman. Nobody seems to know what a man who got a rag was called.

A hot, spiced punch called ‘wassail’, which was served in huge silver or gold bowls, was associated with Twelfth Night since the 1400s. It derived its name from the Old English toast ‘Waes hale’ meaning ‘be thou hale’- that is, be healthy. A related drink called ‘Lambs Wool’ . made of cider or ale, sugar, spices and roasted apples was used by farmers in England and Ireland to ‘wassail’ their apple trees on Twelfth Night, hoping to ensure a good harvest for the next year.

Another custom involved the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury. Pilgrims went to Glastonbury Abbey to see the ‘miraculous’ thorn tree that flowered at midnight. Legend has it that when Joseph of Arimathea reached there in AD63 with the Holy Grail, the staff he thrust into the ground miraculously blossomed.

Taking down Christmas decorations was, by contrast, not a Twelfth Night custom until comparatively recently. Before the days of Queen Victoria, people in England kept their homes decorated with holly, mistletoe and yew up until Candlemas on 2nd February, the Christian festival which falls exactly 40 days after the birth of Jesus. The tradition of taking down decorations on 5th/6th January- and of it being bad luck to take them down either earlier, or later, appears to have originated in colonial America. There, a Christmas wreath was always left up on the front door of each home, and would be taken down at the end of the Twelve Days of Christmas, so that any edible portions would be consumed with the other foods of the Twelfth Night feast.

Now it seems that we are in such a rush to forget all about Christmas that many of us have taken down our decorations well before Twelfth Night. Not only that, but we’re missing out on a celebration which our ancestors regarded as the best party night of the year.


* If you do want to celebrate Twelfth Night in traditional fashion, head for Bankside, outside the Globe Theatre, on the south side of the River Thames in London, at 2.45pm tomorrow afternoon. (Saturday, 6th January). A group of actors called The Lions Part celebrate Twelfth Night with what they describe as ‘a fun combination of old and new seasonal traditions‘. To herald the celebration, the extraordinary Holly Man, the Winter guise of the Green Man from pagan myths and folklore, and decked in fantastic green garb and evergreen foliage, appears from the River Thames. Further details on 020 8452 3866.

The war crimes trial dilemma

This piece of mine appears in Thursday's edition of The Australian.

Neil Clark: Shabby trial a loss for Saddam Hussein's victims
Those accused of war crimes should face an international court that is blind to nationality and impervious to political pressure
January 04, 2007

"ONCE again the more faint-hearted are beset with doubts and anxieties. But we can feel confident that when the smoke has rolled away from the battlefield of controversy, it will be realised that the charge was true and the prosecution fairly conducted."

The words could easily have been uttered by a White House spokesman seeking to defend the trial in Baghdad of the late Saddam Hussein. They were in fact spoken 70 years ago by the British Labour MP Denis Pritt after the conclusion of one of Joseph Stalin's show trials. The passage of time has not been kind on Pritt's judgment, and neither, according to human rights groups, will it be to those who reached a similarly upbeat conclusion about the trial of Hussein.

"It has been a shabby affair, marred by serious flaws," says Amnesty International. For Human Rights Watch, the trial was a lost opportunity to give a sense of the rule of law, and a loss for the victims in that the trial and verdict are unlikely to stand the test of time. In the view of the International Centre for Transitional Justice, proceedings fell short not just of international standards but of standards set by the Iraqi Government.
Human rights groups and other critics of the trial have argued that instead of being tried in Iraq, Hussein should have been brought before an international tribunal at The Hague, as former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic had been. But can we be sure that a trial outside Iraq would have been any fairer?

Our experience of the workings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and in particular the trial of Milosevic, suggests not.
The four-year-long proceedings, which ended with the death of the defendant, breached several important legal principles that underpin the concept of a fair trial. Hearsay evidence was allowed, as was anonymous testimony. There was blatant political interference: former NATO commander Wesley Clark was allowed to give his testimony in private, with Washington able to apply for removal from the public record of any parts of his evidence that it deemed to be against US interests. Most disturbing of all was the way judge Richard May dismissed as irrelevant the claim by an important witness that a written statement he had made implicating Milosevic had not only been falsified and embellished, but had been extracted from him by treatment legally amounting to torture.

In truth, the ICTY has proved no more a satisfactory organ in delivering justice than the hybrid body the UN established in East Timor in 1999, which was shut down six years later. The UN tribunal, made up of domestic and international judges and prosecutors, was scathingly described in 2002 by David Cohen of the War Crimes Studies Centre at Berkeley as "disorganised, understaffed, vulnerable to local politics" and featuring "a defence unit that is unfairly outgunned by the prosecution". Because of the limitations of the tribunal's powers to extradite indictees from Indonesia, no senior suspects from the Indonesian army stood trial. Indonesia's domestic ad hoc trials of those accused of war crimes in East Timor have proved equally unsatisfactory.

Unsurprisingly, recent experiences of war crimes trials have led some to conclude the whole concept of international justice is inherently flawed. All trials of defeated political enemies are invariably unjust, says John Laughland of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. It is the very principle of such political trials which is at fault, not merely the manner of their conduct. But although constructing a workable and just system of international justice is problematic, we do have one historical model which can point us in the right direction.

The trial of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg, while still open to the charge of being victors' justice, nevertheless met important requirements that the trials of Saddam and Milosevic did not. For a start, there was no dispute as to the court's legality. Germany's unconditional surrender led to the transfer of political authority to the Allied Control Council, which had sovereign power over Germany and could legally choose to punish violations of international law and the laws of war. And although the London Charter of August 1945, which established the Nuremberg Tribunal, restricted the trial to "punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis countries", the Allies acted throughout in accordance with international law. Most important of all, Nuremberg delivered a judgment that we would all do well to remember, namely that to initiate a war of aggression was the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes only in that it contained within it the accumulated evil of the whole.

Sixty years on from Nuremberg, supporters of international justice pin their hopes on the International Criminal Court that came into existence in July 2002. There are, however, two major stumbling blocks to the court proving to be an effective body. First, although the court was set up as a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression, its jurisdiction over the crime of aggression has been postponed until such time as the state parties agree on a definition of the crime and set out the conditions under which it may be prosecuted.

Second, the world's most powerful country, the US, refuses to submit to the court's jurisdiction.
It's revealing that the court, despite receiving close to 1700 communications about alleged crimes in 39 countries, has so far opened an investigation only in three cases, all involving African states. Surely we can do better than this.

In order for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression to be properly punished, what is needed is a well-funded, permanent international court that delivers justice regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators and extraneous political pressures. That, of course, means the leaders of the world's most powerful nations must accept that they too may have to answer in a court of law for their actions. Whether that is a utopian dream or an achievable ambition, only time will tell.

Consumerism comes to India

Erich Fromm always told us it would be like this:
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?menuID=2&subID=1292

Beyond sick: The mind of Stephen Pollard

Last night I dreamed that Neil Clark had fallen under a bus (actually he was crushed between a bus and a Mercedes). So far nothing. No doubt if Clark is at some point crushed between a bus and a Merc and he survives, he'll claim that I was driving one of the vehicles and Oliver Kamm paid me off.
Stated by: Joshua on January 2, 2007 8:42 PM

The above comment was posted on the website of Stephen Pollard:
http://www.stephenpollard.net/cgi-bin/mt/my-comments.cgi?entry_id=3091
Previous commenters to Pollard's blog have accused 'Joshua' of being Pollard himself, pointing to the fact that 'Joshua' only ever turns up to comment on Pollard's site. That's not strictly true: he once showed up to counter a comment I had made on The Times 'Comment Central' to accuse me of anti-semitism - his standard party trick as regulars to Pollard's site will know.

Whether Joshua is Pollard's alter ego is something only Stephen knows and I make no accusation here. But for Pollard to allow such a sick comment to be published on his site and not to delete it as soon as it appeared speaks volumes about how low Pollard is prepared to go. I was once warned by one distinguished and very experienced British journalist that Pollard was a ' total shit'. I'll leave readers to come to their own conclusions as to whether the journalist's opinion was accurate. I've already made my mind up.

UPDATE: Pollard claims that he removed the offensive comment, posted at 8.42pm, as soon as he read it on arriving home last night. But one thing is still unclear. Why did Pollard repost this http://www.stephenpollard.net/003092.html blog entry at 1.27 this morning? The post was already up last night at around 10.15, as I'm sure other readers of Pollards' blog will concur. I can't remember the exact time I read it, but it was certainly before I went to bet at about 10.45pm. The fact that the post was published earlier, strongly suggests that Pollard was already back home by 10.30 (as far as I know only Stephen posts on his own blog). Now it could be that Pollard did not read the offensive comment by Joshua before going to bed. But if that's the case, why was his Times piece deleted and then republished at a later time? Only Stephen knows the answer.

The wonders of the joint-newest member of the EU

At midnight, Bulgaria, together with Romania, became a member of the EU. Do try and catch this wonderful country before the real estate sharks, developers and other emissaries of 'progress' spoil it forever. To mark the accession, here's my travel piece on Bulgaria from The Spectator.

How we fell in love with Bulgaria
The Spectator, 1st April 2006

What are the first images which spring to your mind at the mention of the word ‘Bulgaria’? Female weightlifters? Dour, unsmiling locals? Sinister secret agents who assassinate people with poison-tipped umbrellas in busy London streets? ‘No matter how many times you say it, no matter what accent you say it in, Bulgarian ain’t never going to be cool,’ opines a columnist in one of the glossy weekend travel supplements — and it’s certainly hard to deny that the Balkan republic does suffer from a rather serious image problem. But as in so many other cases — think coach holidays and Belgium — the popular image bears little relation to reality.

My wife and I came to visit Bulgaria by accident. Plan A was a trip to New York, finally to visit a friend whom we have spent the best part of a decade promising we’d go and see. Five days before the off, though, I made the discovery that I didn’t possess the machine-readable passport which Uncle Sam now insists upon. Faced with the prospect of seven days at home clearing the backlog of Christmas videos, we quickly decided on Plan B: a frantic internet search for a couple of cheap last-minute flights to whatever destination we could find, the only proviso being that it must be somewhere cold and cosy with the guarantee of plenty of snow. ‘How about Plovdiv?’ asked my wife. With our guidebook telling us that Plovdiv, ‘population 371,000, Bulgaria’s second largest city’, was a ‘delightful place’ and the BBC weather website predicting two days of snow and sub-zero temperatures, we didn’t take long to make up our minds. We landed at Plovdiv airport — a military airport only used in the winter for charter flights — at seven o’clock on a freezing cold January evening.

It was love at first sight: arrive at a Bulgarian military airport on a freezing cold January evening and you get a real sense of being in Eastern Europe — a feeling you no longer get when you arrive at the pristine terminals of so many of New Europe’s other airports. This is the loveliest of all towns. It’s beauty shines from faraway,’ wrote the Greek poet Lucian of Plovdiv 19 centuries ago, and if he was guilty of over-egging it, it certainly wasn’t by much. Plovdiv, or Philippopolis, to give it its original name, is older than both Rome and Athens. Its antiquity means that whatever your architectural fix, you’re likely to find it here — whether it’s Thracian ruins from 5,000 bc, a wonderfully preserved 2nd-century Roman amphitheatre (which could seat 6,000 people at its peak and which still stages concerts and shows in the summer), or 1960s socialist functional.

The crowning glory is the picturesque old town, famous for its remarkable collection of 19th-century baroque-style ‘revival’ houses, named after the cultural, political and linguistic renaissance which led to the country’s liberation from the Ottoman yoke in the 1870s. Several of these houses are open to the public. We opted for the Stepan Hindlyan House with its well-preserved Turkish bathroom, colourful murals and exquisite collection of restored period furniture. Don’t miss, too, the nearby Ethnographic Museum, whose magnificent entrance hall with its grand piano and intricately carved wooden ceiling is worth the admission fee alone. For us, the only disappointment with Plovdiv was the lack of snow — so after three days we decided to head for the mountains.

At seven hours long, the ride from Plovdiv to Bansko won’t be the quickest railway journey in your life, but it may well prove to be the most memorable. For the last five hours, after changing at Septemvri, you travel on a narrow-gauge railway, which meanders its way through some of the most spectacular mountain scenery in Europe. Halfway through the journey, at one of the numerous small village stops, a group of peasants boarded, headed by a cheery soul with a Terry-Thomas grin who proceeded to treat us — and the other inhabitants of our carriage — to two hours of accordion playing and a sing along of Bulgarian folk songs. When’s the last time you experienced that on Virgin trains?

We arrived in Bansko in sky-high spirits, yet famished Fortunately salvation was at hand in the shape of a gloriously smoky, 1940s time-warp restaurant in the main town square. Bulgarian cuisine is among the finest in Europe, but a word of warning: for the Bulgar chef ‘waste not want not’ really is taken literally, and among the delightful dishes on the menu brains, tongue and tripe lie in wait for those who, like me, get their Cyrillic alphabet mixed up. That said, if you’re ever going to cock up your order, with an average price of about 50p for a main course, Bulgaria is the place to do it. It’s also a good opportunity to let rip with the wine list: in how many other countries in Europe can you order the most expensive vintage and still receive change from £2?

Having got our fix of snow from two days in Bansko, we decided to head to Sofia, three hours away by coach. The Bulgarian capital may not be one of the most high- profile in Europe, but it is certainly one of the most likable. In no other European capital of a similar size does one get such a sense of space: Sofia really is the perfect city for people who normally hate cities. It has enough attractions to justify several visits, but with time at a premium we had to make do with tours of the ‘Holy Trinity’ — the Sveta Nedelya Cathedral, the St Nikolai Russian Church with its five golden onion domes, and the awesome Aleksander Nevski Church, built as a memorial to the 200,000 Russian soldiers who died fighting for Bulgaria’s independence. We also, thankfully, found time to visit the splendidly old-fashioned Museum of Natural History, with its fabulous collection of over a million animal, plant and mineral specimens.

One of the nicest of many nice things about Bulgaria is the custom of posting notices with the names and photographs of the deceased on walls and doors. At first I thought this morbid. But being reminded of those who once walked among us helps create a great sense of continuity and community, besides keeping us focused on what really matters. ‘There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love ...the only meaning,’ as Thornton Wilder put it. We saw hundreds of these notices and, even in the centre of Sofia, not a single one was defaced. The lack of vandalism is not the only area in which Bulgaria outscores Britain. Public transport, besides being cheap, is clean and punctual. People may not be effusive or prone to shouting in the streets but they are kind, friendly and unfailingly helpful; family ties and religious beliefs remain strong. Crime is low and there is a high general level of education.

For those keen to experience ‘backward’ Eastern Europe, Bulgaria and not Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic or Poland is the real McCoy. Do try and catch this wonderful country before the real estate sharks, the EU commissars and the other emissaries of ‘progress’ spoil it for ever.