By Adam Hunt
Sports Reporter / Columnist
Just over two weeks ago, terrorist gunmen in a part of Angola plagued by violence opened fire with machine-guns on a bus carrying Togo’s national soccer team to the African Cup of Nations, killing the driver and injuring a further nine, including three players.
“We were machine-gunned like dogs,” Togo striker Thomas Dossevi told reporters. “They were armed to the teeth and we spent at least 20 minutes underneath the seats of the bus in fear.”
Whilst the event went largely unnoticed here in the USA, it raised several potential security fears for this summer’s World Cup in South Africa. Furthermore, it was a frighteningly stark reminder of the physical and psychological damage that premeditated violence can cause when carried out in the public eye.
This tragic conjunction of sport and terrorism stirs many thoughts and emotions. Our horror at the ordeal endured by the Togo team; our empathy with the families of those who lost their lives or were injured; and our wonderment that anybody could believe that the murder of innocents might provide moral support for a cause of any kind.
Although the uppermost thought in my mind is that sport, however seriously one may take it, can never be worth any loss of life. That these invented worlds of bat, ball, club, puck and the like, which get so many of us so very animated, are, when all is said and done, rather trivial.
Now I know there are plenty of notable sporting figures who have claimed that sport is, indeed, a matter of life and death.
And sport does matter. It matters so much that it is worth staging even when there is a real danger of fatalities, whether to players or fans. This may seem a strange, almost jarring assertion, but it is surely the only viewpoint worth having.
After all, why do we want to live in the first place? The answer is because of the things that make life worth living. And it is hardly a perceptive observation that sport is one of these things. It is certainly something I value deeply: as a sportsman on the field, as a television viewer on the couch, as a spectator in the stadiums. Sport is certainly a gift of life.
This, of course, is one of the reasons why terrorists, particularly of certain perspectives, are keen to target sport. They see in its innocence a profound and offensive sense of enjoyment. By targeting grand sporting occasions, they seek not only to secure a global platform for whatever extreme cause they endorse, they also strike a blow against the very gifts of life I mentioned earlier. They take something away from what makes life valuable and, therefore, meaningful.
That is why if you were to say that there was a chance that a spectator would die during the Olympics as a result of terrorism, most fans would want to make our way to the stadiums nonetheless.
And if you told athletes before the Games that one of them would likely die as a result of a suicide bomber, few would decline to participate. We may revise our thoughts as the risks escalate, but in no circumstances would we wish to spend our lives cowering in panic, for that would be no life at all.
We all make choices. Every time we step out of our homes we are asserting the dominance of living over the imperative of not dying. We are taking a risk, however small, in the pursuit of something that makes the journey of life worth the price of the ticket.
Such choices are, in an important sense, individual, which is why no athlete or fan should be placed under political pressure to attend a sporting event. But it is also why many of us willingly accept the risks of the modern world.
None of this is to deny the importance of security and the responsibilities of organizers for the safety of competitors and spectators. Nor is it to diminish the horror of what happened to Togo’s brave players.
But it is to say that, in a world in which it is impossible to offer concrete guarantees about safety, we can nevertheless have urgent reasons to stage, to play, to watch and to enjoy sport.
I sometimes wonder if the primary goal of terrorism is to turn life into a prolonged futility; to compel us to live lives of such unease that we turn our backs on the things that make time fly.
We must not allow that to happen, now or in the future, not just because to do so would be to excite more terrorism, but because a life stripped bare of the essential gifts is no life at all.
