"Can sport still function, now that honour has been abandoned?"

When an Australian journalist reported that runner Caster Semenya was a hermaphrodite, with internal testes and an abnormal high level of testosterone, (Athletics South Africa) ASA accused Mike Hurst and other journalists of racism and insensitivity towards “our little girl”.

Now, e-mails show that ASA knew about test results that showed the runner was not female.
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They knew and they let her compete. At what point does someone say how unfair this is to female contestants who work hard at their sports and how it is a colossal cheat? When does someone call Semenya out for deliberately depriving someone else of their deserved triumph? When does someone condemn the trainers and teams and governments who support this outrage? Or the officials who ignore the unfairness?

Simon Barnes, Chief Sports Writer for the Times of London, writes, "It's official: honour is consigned to history"

There was a time, too, when honour mattered in sport.

In fact, all sport is predicated on the notion of honour. The conduct and the rules of sport depend on the notion that contestants are on their honour. They may make mistakes, but they have, by the act of taking part, given their word of honour not to cheat, not to deceive, not to conceal inconvenient truths. It is on the assumption of honour that sport was codified and organised and first practised.

Sport is at present engulfed by a tsunami of cheating. In Formula One, we have the allegation that a driver was given the potentially lethal instruction to crash his car on purpose. In rugby union, we had the farce of “Bloodgate”, the bringing about of a substitution by means of a fake-blood capsule.

n football, we have daily stories of divers. Who conned the referee? Who was genuinely fouled? Who was unjustly accused of faking it and who got away with it? It has become impossible to tell, as the case of Eduardo da Silva shows. He was banned for simulation and got off on appeal. Did he or didn’t he? No one knows.

In cricket, it is now accepted that batsmen don’t walk when they know they are out. To even things up, fielders appeal when they know the batsman is not out. Fielders sometimes claim a catch when they know the ball hit the ground. . . .

We no longer see sport as a moral lesson. Sport is about victory, and professional sport has become a highly remunerative popular entertainment, although one of a uniquely complex kind. As this change has come about, yesterday’s self-sacrificing hero has become today’s bloody fool.

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You could say much the same thing about politics and democracy. [See story below.]