Sport at its best

Sport at its best is a lively diversion from the everyday.

An encouragement to exercise in your own way.

Magnificently unimportant.

Allowing the ridiculously passionate and the armchair enthusiast

To indulge themselves at rest.

That is when sport is at its best.

Then when you consider:

The obscene amount of money it generates

That feeds and nurtures and exaggerates

And becomes itself corrupted and corruptible.

Sport does not look so good.

Then when you observe:

The racism and spectator violence and the often necessary brutality.

The chemical enhancing and doping and the cheating reality.

Then the unnecessary pain that is in the name of entertain.

And a horse writhing, jerking in wide-eyed agony... before it is shot dead.

The physical trauma of training and exercise every day.

For that one in a thousand chance of fame and pay.

The motor sport crash at the edge of speed.

Or a child robbed of a childhood indeed.

Where do we go from here?

Where does sport defend itself?

It is just another gamble.