On Thursday I went to one of the most uplifting sports events I have attended in a long time.
It took place in a small English town of perhaps 12,000 people with Roman origins. Its apogee came when the sport’s supreme champion of modern times, aged 39, set a benchmark for sustained excellence and endurance on a par with Australian cricketer Don Bradman’s 99.94 Test match batting average, or US swimmer Michael Phelps’s 22 Olympic medals, or, yes, Pelé’s 1,281 goals.
The event was the horseracing meeting at which A.P,McCoy, at around 3.15pm, rode the 4,000th winner of his career. (No other jump-jockey has reached even 3,000 winners.)
The mathematics of sporting accomplishment was only one of the reasons why the afternoon was so special.
The ruggedness of even journeyman jump-jockeys beggars belief. They compile catalogues of broken bones as long as even the greediest child’s Christmas list and many must starve and sweat for years on end to maintain a viable riding weight. McCoy’s record bespeaks a drive and toughness shared by very few inside or outside elite sport.
There was that all-important edge of tension among the spectators, if not necessarily McCoy. It was only in the final strides of his final ride of the day that it became clear that this bucolic amphitheatre at Towcester would indeed be the place where the milestone was reached
And there was the satisfaction of seeing a great champion perform at his best. The irresistible surge McCoy conjured from his mount, Mountain Tunes, almost within the shadow of the winning-post, was typical of the finishing bursts that had delivered perhaps a couple of hundred of those 4,000 winners.
There was something else too: the almost complete absence of the trappings of commercialism to which we have become inured as part of the price we pay for excellence in sport.
For example, admission was free; for example, official race-cards (now guaranteed collectors’ items) cost all of £3; for example, the only branding I can clearly recall was on McCoy’s breeches – and this was not for a mobile phone or online gaming service, but a potato company.
This was partly the nature of the beast: no-one could be quite sure when or where the landmark 4,000th winner would come.
But the effect was wonderful, like escaping the sweep of city lights for the first time in months and seeing the stars.
I am not naïve. Elite horseracing needs money like any other sport. Some probably view the day as a wasted business opportunity. But, given the way in which so much insipid fare these days gets over-hyped and over-priced, Thursday blew a joyous raspberry at the gods of yield management and market forces.
The football industry, of course, sells its fair share of mutton as lamb. Not always; it is a great sport that sells plenty of lamb as lamb. But it very rarely sells lamb as mutton.
This is a definition of good marketing. In the past generation, a working men’s pastime has been transformed into a global business phenomenon so magnetic that the rich and famous will pay a year’s salary for most of us (50 years’ for some) to be seen at the showpiece occasions. In this way, as the BBC twigged well ahead of the curve in 1990, football is the new opera.
The only reason the sport can get away with the levels of exploitation we now see, however, is the utter devotion football clubs inspire in their most dedicated followers. Whether worshipping at the shrine of Barcelona or Billingham Synthonia, the fans who follow their clubs at home and abroad, cradle to grave, using club-branded credit cards to snap up each and every dodgy away shirt, manifest a depth of brand loyalty that blue-chip companies spend billions trying to inculcate.
For this type of fan, every second of every match – not to mention the transfer sagas, injury crises and other plot-lines that delineate the game’s perpetual soap opera – comes laden with emotional charge. Entertainment is secondary. The most turgid goalless draw can be a source of almost mystic inspiration if it qualifies the club for the Champions League or keeps it in the fourth division.
Trouble is, the unrelenting marketing that has helped to enrich the sport’s biggest stars and fuel its expansion, attacks this sort of unconditional devotion at source.
My father has supported Liverpool all his life. Always has, always will. Why? Because he was born there. It would have made little difference had they never won a single league title or European championship.
When I was small, I did likewise. Why? Because he did. Once I got old enough to go to live matches, however, my loyalties gradually switched to local teams I could see in the flesh. At first, this meant Taunton Town; then, after moving house (and now for 40-some years), Bristol City.
When my dad was a kid, there was no football on TV; when I was, still relatively little. Today, a high proportion of top games are broadcast live and, even though the lion’s share are on pay-TV, it is easier, cheaper and, from a parent’s perspective, safer for kids to watch in their living-rooms and on their computers than in the stadium.
This media revolution, plus a small child’s natural inclination to side with a winner, makes them more likely than previous generations to identify with the Manchester Uniteds and Chelseas rather than a local team.
But will the kids I see running around in their Agüero, Rooney and Torres shirts in Oxford and rural Buckinghamshire mature into ‘City/United ’til I die’ fans, with lifelong revenue-raising potential for the club in question?
Since their garment choice usually reflects whom they most want to emulate rather than any more deeply-rooted attachment, you have to think that the answer to that question is, “Only if they keep winning”.
This perhaps goes some way to explaining the pressures to tilt the financial, and hence competitive, balance more and more in favour of the established giants that are part and parcel of the complex power battles that have accompanied the flow of serious money into the sport.
But even winning gets boring if repeated often enough and with little tension. And this perhaps goes some way to explaining the way in which the significance of predictably tame encounters is so frequently overegged by those with some sort of financial stake in the sport and its continued growth.
Yes, maybe racing administrators missed a trick on Thursday by not charging £10 or £20 on the gate for what was a pretty good shot at witnessing genuine sporting history. I doubt anyone lucky enough to be there would have begrudged it.
But better in the long run to miss out on one pay day and allow grateful spectators the sort of sporting windfall that generates a rich legacy of goodwill than to squeeze supporters trapped by their own devotion until the pips squeak.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s horseracing book – Foinavon: the story of the Grand National’s biggest upset – was published this year by Bloomsbury. His Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938