The British LTA: Lousy Toff’s Association?

When you think of Lithuania, if ever in fact, what normally comes to mind? The Eurovision song contest? Maybe. Perhaps even the capital city of Vilnius may enter your schema once in a blue moon, even then only as a cheap alternative to Prague for a RyanAir weekend away. For some exceptional sport’s junkies possible connections may be made to a competent national basketball team? But Lithuania and world class tennis players are rarely mentioned in the same sentence together.

However Lithuania have just risen above Great Britain in the world tennis rankings thanks to a comprehensive victory in the Davis Cup (Or AEGON Team GB, as their proud, or now not so proud sponsors like them to be known). Which leads us to ask the question “golly, are Lithuania good at tennis?” The answer is no, just that Britain are really that bad. Failure to win against Turkey in a relegation playoff in July will see the loser drop into Europe/Africa Zone Group III, the lowest tier of the competition.

O for the days of Tiger Tim and Greg Rusedski! Alex Bogdanovic, not exactly a household name, is the second best male in British tennis and is currently cemented at a lowly 151st in the world rankings. The ladies side, despite a recent resurgence, fares little better with just two players inside the top one hundred worldwide players.

A similar state of affairs was evident in Vancouver where the British Olympic team only escaped total embarrassment by collecting one gold medal, the exploits of one Amy Williams we can thank for that. In the British ski team it was more battle of the richest, than the fittest, whereby only those that could afford to fund their own exploits could compete as all financial support was withdrawn to the athletes in the weeks prior to Vancouver.

Skiing in the alp’s, tennis at Wimbledon, cricket at Lord’s.....not exactly a working class man’s ideal day out is it? Britain needs to forget it’s sporting Bourgeois roots once and for all if it is to ever satisfy the worldwide success it craves as the next host of the Olympics. If an Australian was told he wasn’t dressed adequately for a game of lawn tennis, or didn’t have the required levels of elocution his reply would probably mirror “Gee’s piss off mate”, not to stereotype of course, but the point is their success as a sporting nation is based on accessibility to all.

Why pick on tennis? Because it epitomizes the “leave it to the rich kid’s” attitude of British sport.

By Ed Barney

Tradition in Sport

So it seems that the ski cross has been the unashamed success of Vancouver 2010. Thrills, spills, Chris Del Bosco getting on the pills... (OK, alcohol and marijuana...) surely this was sport at its finest? The crowds were queuing up to get into the Cypress Mountain resort and spectators worldwide were relishing the man-on-man confrontation that provided us with a clear winner without the waiting around for half the morning that is unfortunately part of the traditional alpine skiing events.



The fact that Del Bosco wasn’t satisfied with bronze and went for silver on the penultimate jump, and ended up with his nose in the white stuff (...) seemed to encapsulate the drama and ensured the sport was welcomed with open arms by everyone into Olympic sport.

So, why the cries of dissent from much of the Alpine skiing fraternity? Of course, the “tradition” card. Alpine skiing has been most revered way of deciding who is the finest skier of them all for around a century, in competition at least: the female gold medallist Ashleigh McIvor says “ski cross is just a new form of ski racing, which has been around forever - racing your friends to the bottom”.

But in Britain, we don’t have the same connection with alpine skiing as those in The Alps or The Rockies, so there’s no reason for us to hate ski cross and every reason to love it. But if I was born into a alpine skiing family in Tignes, ski cross would would be like taking one of our most traditional, longstanding national sports and commercialising it... oh, wait.

Tradition is clearly very important to sport. Wimbledon whites, Cup Final Day, the Grand National on the BBC... all these are pillars of reference for us, traditions that will be constant no matter what’s going on in our own lives, and that will certainly enrich the lives of many. So therefore it’s going to be a shock when things change, as the wild children grow up to be wild adults. And as the old lady loses her friends, the OAPs must grudgingly rely on those wild children who to pay for their care homes with the money from the sale of their souls.

The TV money from Twenty20 has been vital to keep the county game in England alive, so the bacon and egg-wearing old boys must be happy that they can still read the Telegraph in peace at Lords on a Tuesday in late April and have a bit of a snooze afterwards, even if they have to put up with a few cheerleaders in bikinis on the odd evening in the school holidays. And as traditional winter events are under threat from the rock and roll X-Games, the Alpine skiing world must open its arms to Chris Del Bosco, let him keep his money to fuel his alcohol habit, and sit back to enjoy the chaos that follows.

By Will Atkinson

A Bigger Picture

Does sport really control its own destiny? Yes most certainly. Are we as consumers of sport really getting what we truly desire from it? Most Certainly. When we turn on the TV, switch on the laptop, even listen to the radio what are we getting? Exactly what we decide we want as a collective group? These are the sort of questions a liberal pluralist’s naivety would leave us to believe. For example believing we are digesting sport in its natural form, that sport has not changed, or if indeed it has, then all for the better. Even Rupert the Mogul Murdoch himself admits that this is not the case,(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K2pLo8JV5Y)how can it possibly be? Would we really be watching men in “pyjamas” playing a cricket match that doesn’t even last long enough for the quintessential English tea break? Or as the case may be not even watch it because the owners make it so expensive to do so that the average Joe Bloggs can’t even afford the subscription fee.

Not only are the men (and it nearly always is men, sports media being a largely male controlled industry) changing the very game we watch into a packaged commodity, or more perhaps more aptly phrased dramatic entertainment, they also shape our opinions through exploiting both sports and athletes.

The truth of the matter is, even though at times it is hard to recognize, some forms of the media don’t give a true representation of reality. Let’s take Vancouver, is it really that bad? Remember the worse it is constructed to appear the better that London is going to appear in contrast, something all Brits desire so we can avoid comparisons with what was a truly mesmerizing Beijing.

Let’s take the world’s most valuable athlete, even now after fifteen minutes of pure cringe(http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/golf/8525557.stm), Tiger Woods as an example. From hero to villain is something we see all too often, John Terry, Wayne Rooney (does anyone even remember the rumoured forty year old prostitute?!), even, dare to mention his name in a bad light, David Beckham. The difference with the eye of the Tiger Woods though is that he still seems to be in control, bucking the trend, he was definitely in no danger of losing it during his latest press appearance, offering no time for any questions from journalists. Are we supposed to feel sorry for the multibillionaire multi-loving supernaturally gifted sportsman? The truth is in a year’s time and more importantly several golf titles later the boys from the press will probably be running out of superlatives to describe Woody Wood’s comeback. Reputation intact, infidelity forgotten.

With Tiger at the helm of the ship, domineering over the media staff on deck, we see a metaphoric slave like figure in Danny Cipriani, the English rugby player, trapped in the helms below being abused by his superiors in the press. Do they resent his working class upbringing? Is the son of a taxi driving mother not good enough for their elitist game? They do seem pretty unrepentant in their criticism of a perfectly good, young British rugby player.



The truth of the matter is, even though at times it is hard to recognize, some forms of the media don’t give a true representation of reality. Let’s take Vancouver, is it really that bad? Remember the worse it is constructed to appear the better that London is going to appear in contrast, something all Brits desire so we can avoid comparisons with what was a truly mesmerizing Beijing. Im sure Seb Coe won't let us down though will he?