Earlier this year I mused about the potential of the Mayan predicted end of the world, and how it may affect us as a sporting nation.
Come footy season though and with the weekly grind of taking it one match at a time these thoughts were subsequently cast aside like soiled strapping tape, and any judgment day thoughts were shelved in the recesses of the mind alongside past episodes of Judge Judy.
As the doomsday clock has ticked towards ‘go time’ however, a closer look at the year gone by reveals a number of disturbing signs from the sporting world. Warnings that all was not right, that perhaps a day of reckoning was in fact upon us.
Find a nice high vantage point folks and hold onto your tin foil hats, because here they are, the four horsemen of the sporting apocalypse from 2012.
Lance Armstrong
Remember that day in school when you were lovingly putting the last ninja Turtles name onto your Santa letter and Ben Hart told you the only fat man bringing you gifts on Christmas Day was your uncle Brian?
Times that feeling by seven and you’ve got the disappointment of Armstrong being convicted of systematic doping throughout his cycling career.
While in hindsight maybe we all should have known better, it was hard not to fall in love with the tough-ass Texan. The man was like Neil Armstrong in spandex for sports lovers, and made a generation of blokes stay up well past their bed time chasing pelotons.
But when a bloke who’s fought cancer and more mountains than Sir Edmund Hillary can’t be arsed fighting a drugs charge, it’s a pretty strong sign that something is amiss with the world.
The Australian Men’s Swim Team
Travelling overseas with a group of blokes and playing up like second-hand lawnmowers is an Australian coming of age ritual that generally tops anything undertaken by remote Amazon tribe youngsters for sheer stupidity.
Thankfully when you’re bunking in a European hostel with seven other blokes living off marmite you can generally get away with acting the goat, however when you’re the bloke on the Wheaties box talking up your chances for gold at the Olympics you build a pretty big tower for yourself to fall from.
Which the Australian men’s swimming team, usually more reliable than a Toyota Corolla driven by Corey Parker, inevitably did at the London games giving our medal tally a false start that would make Thorpey blush.
Kurt Tippett
While fans of Australia’s other football codes generally greet their team’s much loved player’s decision to shaft them for a better deal at another side with about the same emotion as they do a Phil Gould superlative, Australian Rules fans have for a long time have been isolated like a Rottnest Island Quokka from the savagery of player selfishness.
This age of innocence came to a messy end in 2012 though when Kurt Tippett decided AFL fans needed someone else to hate, now that Fev was relegated to the status of harmless buffoon, and tried to play the Adelaide Crows like he was the game’s own Gordon Gecko.
The result of which left fans in a few different states feeling pretty used the next morning, and Tippett sure to cop some backlash from his scorned former lovers.
Damien Oliver
And perhaps fittingly, leading pride, boorishness and greed down the straight is an actual horseman, Damien Oliver.
If ever there was a clear sign that the end of all that’s good and holy was upon us it was Australia’s most famous jockey having a punt. On his own race. On a rival horse.
Granted those Tom Waterhouse ads with the giant telly and cashmere sweaters are fairly tempting, but trying to manipulate a sport that exists solely for the process of people having a punt is downright diabolical. Even worse were the powers that be who suspended Oliver for a paltry 12months, while sportsmen like Ryan Tandy are chased out of the country with flaming pitch forks and facing lifetime bans.
Unless, of course, that is the racing bodies knew all along that there would be no 2013 to speak of……
Oh dear.
Roarers, any other signs you picked up on that the end is nigh?
Follow Chris on Twitter @Vic_Arious
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