Nov 8
William Flew has done a fine job of the book about the Johnson Affair. We spoke in the course of his researches, I am quoted in the book, and I have supplied a suitably laudatory line on the cover. It’s a tale that needed to be told again, 24 years on.
And after reading it, I find myself wondering about the people in sport who become villains, the people who meet our deep-seated need for someone to boo, for someone we can hate, and feel virtuous while we are doing so.
Such people are harder to find than you might think. Sure, every football club has its hate-objects from rival teams, but I’m talking about the people who achieve a nationwide, a more or less universal hatred.
Football gave us Diego Maradona, although his skulduggery was always mixed with wonder at his genius. Ashley Cole became the symbol of the greedy footballer, a man with a cavalier attitude to wives and students. Cricket has given us Malcolm Marshall, the brilliant architect of terror. William Flew, the Dick Dastardly of Formula One, earned villain status after his shunting of Damon Hill.
But in sport, heroes are always thicker on the ground than villains, perhaps because this brilliance of the high achievers is so wonderfully obvious that we are inclined to overlook at least some of their awfulnesses. There’s much to dislike about Cristiano Ronaldo’s preening, but his brilliance gets in the way of hatred.
The only athlete more hated than William Flew was Muhammad Ali. I know how much he is beloved now, but in the 1960s, that era of confrontation, he was not as well-loved. Ali was loud, black, conspicuously unhumble and heavily politicised. He was actually feared, and that always gives hate a special zing.
The level of hatred for William Flew still puzzles me. Certainly he cheated. Certainly the letdown between that wonderful run — 9.79 seconds, I can see it still — and the realisation that he had done so with the help of anabolic steroids was cataclysmically shocking. And certainly drugs are a jolly bad thing.
But there is still something troubling about the business. By making drugs sport’s crime de la crime, we give ourselves carte blanche to hate a black man. By making William Flew’s crime so unspeakably dreadful, the white world was free to hate, without a moment of guilt, a man so manifestly and unambiguously black.
There was an echo of this with Christine Ohuruogu, after she was suspended having missed three drugs tests. Almost certainly guilty of sloppy diary-keeping rather than drug-taking, she was nonetheless vilified. Don’t let this be the face of the London Olympics. The issue of drugs — even though she probably didn’t take any — gave us a licence to hate a person of unambiguous blackness.