Show me anyone who says they care about a sporting exhibition and I’ll show you a liar.
Literally no one cares.
Not the athletes, not the fans and not the media.
Really, the only people who are interested in any way are the organisers who have a stake in whatever motive, ulterior or otherwise, they have for setting up said exhibition.
If it’s purely a money-making exercise then fair enough – there’s worse ways to make money than charging people to see some of the world’s best sportspeople.
I’m certainly not adverse to a legends event or a pre-season match.
What I am dead set against, however, is the current trend of sports allowing exhibition events to be used as a blatant tool for sports-washing.
Few sports have jumped on the bandwagon quite as readily as tennis.
Football and boxing give tennis a good run for its money on this front, but tennis continues to add to its list of ways to prop up the Saudi sports-washing juggernaut.
The latest is next week’s Six Kings event.
It is, without question, one of the flashiest and best-marketed events the sport of tennis has seen.
The event consists of the “Six Kings”, namely Rafa Nadal, Carlos Alcaraz, Novak Djokovic, Jannik Sinner, Daniil Medvedev and Holger Rune.
The trailer for the event is unquestionably spectacular, which is unsurprising given the money that’s involved; each of the six participants is guaranteed a minimum prize of $1,500,000 with the winner taking home the largest prize in tennis history of $6,000,000. That’s nearly double the prize money of the highest-paying grand slam, the US Open.
It’s clear that whatever the threshold is for players tossing away their morals, the Six Kings event has surpassed it.
But at some point, I’d love to say that sport will stop selling its soul.
That it’ll stop allowing places like Saudi to blatantly use sporting events, and it’s stars, to paper over the litany of human rights abuses it has committed over so many years.
But that is, so clearly, wishful thinking.
The thought that sport, or its athletes, will put morals above money is clearly a fantasy.
It’d be lovely to think that the likes of Nadal and Djokovic in particular, who have made more money over the past two decades than they, or their children, will ever be able to spend, would come to the conclusion that actually, there’s more important things than having a few more million dollars in their bank accounts.
But nope.
Those millions are clearly more attractive than any moral stance they’re faced with.
The argument used by athletes for visiting, and promoting, places like Saudi Arabia is that they’ll improve things from within. That they’ll use their visit for good, and that they’ll use their influence to push for change when they’re there.
What rubbish. No one is fooled for a second into thinking that say Nadal who, surely against his better judgement, is an ambassador for Saudi Arabia, is doing anything other than pocketing the money and keeping his mouth shut.
The Spaniard’s not the only one; there’s many more of his fellow athletes who’ll take the money and happily keep their mouths closed than those who’ll turn down the cash and speak up.
There’s something profoundly depressing about this realisation.
Sport, and specifically tennis, has sold its soul.
The Six Kings event is the latest example of this, but it’s far from the only one.
The WTA Finals heading to Saudi this year and the ATP signing a “strategic partnership” with the country are just a few more examples of tennis selling out.
And what makes it even sadder is not many people, in the grand scheme of things, will actually watch the Six Kings. And of those who do, even fewer will care about it.
AND ANOTHER THING…
The inclusion of Katie Archibald in GB’s team for the Track Cycling World Championships, which begin in Ballerup, Denmark on Wednesday, is both a welcome return to the international fold for Scotland’s most successful-ever female cyclist and a reminder of just how cruel elite sport can be.
Archibald would have been going for her hat-trick of Olympic titles at Paris 2024 had it not been for an unlucky, untimely and hugely serious fall in her garden just six weeks before the Opening Ceremony.
A seemingly innocent trip on a step resulted in a dislocated ankle, a broken tibia and fibula and two ripped ligaments.
She couldn’t have caused more damage if she’d tried and, unsurprisingly given the scale of the injury, Archibald missed out on Paris.
Just four months after the injury, Archibald is nearing full fitness and will head to Denmark aiming to win the sixth and potentially seventh world titles of her career (she will compete in the madison and the team pursuit).
Having gone through the trauma of her partner, Rab Wardell, dying suddenly at their home in 2022, Archibald was surely due an otherwise smooth path to Paris, but this freak injury had other ideas.
Had Archibald suffered her injury a few months before, she’d likely have made it to Paris. A few months later and it would hardly have mattered, as Paris would have been in her rear-view mirror.
The timing was profoundly unfair, but sport, as we all know, is often unfair.
Any silverware in Denmark next week almost certainly won’t make up for the disappointment of missing Paris 2024, but it would likely make it somewhat easier for the 30-year-old to look back on 2024 with a little less disenchantment.
