The sports journalist Jonathan Liew in yesterday’s Observer wrote about watching, gratis on the street in Montmartre, the Paris Olympics men’s cycling road race. Because Jonathan Liew is a gifted and endearing journalist, and because sport is at once so inessential and yet important to the human condition, he used the occasion to make a case that cycling and sport in general are ‘for everyone’.
He wrote: “Sport is not product. Sport is not asset. Sport is not a walled garden guarded by G4S. Sport is the greatest social glue humanity has invented, a celebration of the body and of a celebration of those who celebrated.”
Sport in truth is all of those things, and has been for some time. The Irish journalist Eamon Dunphy wrote of the Los Angeles Games in 1984 that they were ‘the Sorry But You Can’t Go In There Olympics’. Dunphy went on:
Ideally, a writer can lounge anonymously left of stage and watch as the story unfolds. In Los Angeles anonymity was out of the question. On arrival you were taken to a room, photographed and given a tag to wear around your neck. This happens at all the great world events these days. Great events like the Eurovision Song Contest; EEC Summits, United Nations sessions and Arms Limitation talks. Your tag identifies you but more importantly it determines that you cannot go into certain places. Places where The Story is.
Dunphy was making a plea for the untrammelled journalist, able to wander anywhere to sniff out ‘The Story’. As he well knew, crimes like the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Games in 1972 had driven those identity badges, that served to control access; to deny access to the terrorist, pick-pocket or merely the cheapstakes who wanted to get in without paying. As he showed, the threat and response was not only against sport but entertainment and political gatherings.
Dunphy in 1984 could write of the ID tags because they were still novel. For Jonathan Liew in 2024, they’re all he and nearly everyone have ever known. Hence Liew hailed how, by standing on the street to watch the Olympic cycling, he had: “No QR codes. No searches. No private security sentinels checking your bag and asking you to drink your water to make sure it is, in fact, water.”
Liew hints that the security regime is painful; that it gets in the way of what should be unfiltered; that experience of sport. He could see sport without security and other barriers (including cost of tickets), the same as other pleasures, such as music (often played at the same venues as professional sport). My most moving experiences of music were not at any stadium concerts but (pre-covid) Birmingham Youth Orchestra’s playing of Arvo Paert’s Sanctus in memory of Benjamin Britten at Birmingham Town Hall, in 1997 – to be exact, the simple tolling of a bell; and (post-covid) a busker in Carlisle singing Major Tom. For sport, music, and poetry, are not only about what’s attained by the elite, as grasped by connoisseurs, but what those things evoke in any of us. While Jonathan Liew writes engagingly about the everyday, no newspaper is going to pay him to watch Alloa versus Queen of the South.
Jonathan Liew does have a point. He was among sports writers who covered the remarkable Champions League football final, in Paris in 2022, when Liverpool fans got pepper-sprayed, made to wait so long that they were late inside to watch the match – and far from being hooligans, they had (expensive) tickets! As more generally, security (despite Jonathan Liew’s grumbles) is something only noticed when it goes wrong – whether because done badly, or because of the malice of some.
It’s sad that Jonathan Liew equates G4S with (what we can term for him) sport as a corporate business. It’s rather a stretch to identify a security contractor with big-name sport turning over billions, while the security operatives are earning minimum wage.The May 2023 edition of Professional Security Magazine featured Edgbaston cricket ground, Birmingham (pictured), one of the international venues where G4S has the security contract. As reported then and as seen during the July 2024 England-West Indies Test match, G4S go to some trouble to accommodate the beery but good-natured rowdiness of the Hollies stand. For example, allowing a giant beach ball to be bounced around spectators, while stewards make judgements about when lines are crossed and individuals are being too anti-social.
G4S or any contractor are paid for doing such work; Jonathan Liew and spectators seldom ask themselves whether the stewards, SIA-badged officers at the bag-search tables, or indeed the others providing services – those pouring (ยฃ6 a pint!?) beers, waiting staff serving lunch in the hospitality boxes – actually like sport. Certainly some may, and a sports ground safety officer of a football club at whatever level – Liverpool or Lincoln FC – will want their home team to win, if only because then home fans (usually the big majority of spectators) will walk away happy; whereas if the away team wins, they may taunt the home fans which could cause disorder.
Jonathan Liew writes about sport as ‘something new and stirring and visceral’. Precisely because watching sport in person is so popular, it’s made worse a chronic security and safety problem: far more people want to attend than can fit into a physical space, and not only sporting, but new year in London and Edinburgh. Hence the phenomenon of thousands of Taylor Swift fans sitting on a hill in Munich, which at least gave them a view of the stadium where the American singer played; and during the England-Spain Euros football final last month, thousands in a ‘fan zone’ in the city centre, besides outside the venue. The problem is not new; when England played Australia in a Test match at the Oval in London in the 1930s, the enterprising would sit on a passing tram, so as to (at least for a few seconds) see the scene and the score. Besides the risk of anti-social fans trying to barge in (as at Wembley during the Euros final in July 2021), temporary ‘fan zones’ pose a safety (crushing) and security (acts of terror) risk, yet without the permanent protective measures, physical and procedural, of the stadium proper.
The reality that doesn’t get written about, is all the people that put a uniform on and put a shift in and do routine tasks so Jonathan Liew can enjoy his ringside seats.
