As far as get-out-of-jail cards go, it has to be said that the Zika virus is pretty much all-encompassing.
No one can say that the virus doesn’t exist and while an athlete might be prepared to take the risk of themselves being infected, what right do they have to accept that risk on behalf of a theoretical unborn child?
So who can doubt the world’s leading professional golfers when they say they are pulling out of the Rio Olympics as a precaution against any future children suffering devastating birth defects?
Except that August isn’t mosquito month in Rio. And when the World Cup soccer was held there in July 2014, there was little or no dengue transmission, which is actually the real airborne worry.
If the golfers were truly concerned, hell, there are plenty of other real problems they could focus on. It’s like the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where one of them … I think it was Robert Redford … doesn’t want to jump off a cliff into a stream roaring below because he can’t swim.
“Hell,” says Paul Newman, “you don’t have to worry about drowning ... the fall will kill you.”
No one is harping on that it’s flu season in Brazil or that food poisoning might claim them. People might be suspicious of their real motives for withdrawing. But with a nasty virus, particularly one that can also be transmitted sexually, who can blame the golfers for taking such sensible precautions? I’m sure they would have done exactly the same thing had there been an identical risk of contracting Zika in April at Augusta.
Still, golf does have form for mass withdrawals.
When 1904 St Louis Olympic golf champion George Lyon of Canada turned up to defend his title at the 1908 London Games, an internal dispute among British golfers led to a boycott and he found himself the solitary entrant.
Offered the gold medal, Lyon politely declined it and, as they say, that was that for golf as an Olympic sport until all those IOC members got caught up in the Tiger Woods phenomenon a century later and readmitted it.
Not that the other sport set to make its Olympic reappearance this year, rugby, departed the Games stage any more gracefully. France dutifully made the rugby final of the 1924 Games in Paris but there it came up against a US team that, well, didn’t realise it was there just to make up the numbers.
Two French players were injured, tempers frayed, an American spectator was knocked unconscious by a walking stick and when the visitors won 17-3, they were booed all the way through The Star Spangled Banner.
The gold medallists needed police protection as they left the field, and rugby would not be sighted again at the Olympics for another 92 years.
Yet, unlike golf, rugby doesn’t act like the IOC has placed some impossible demand on it. What? Another pseudo-major? And what’s that you say, there’s no prizemoney at the end of it? Are you kidding me?
No, rugby has seen the upside and embraced the Olympics wholeheartedly. Perhaps it helps that rugby has conveniently developed along two fronts, the regular 15-a-side game and sevens.
The World Cup will always be the pinnacle of the 15s game but the Olympics has become the prize everyone wants to win in sevens.
Australians scoffed when the NZ women’s sevens coach announced that no one would remember who won the 2016 World Series (guess what? It was the Australians) when they are handing out the gold medals in Rio.
But there might just be a just a sneaking suspicion he was right. Here’s hoping the TV commentators are shouting “World champions, now Olympic champions” as the medals are presented. The 12-strong Australian men’s and women’s Olympics squads, plus two reserves, will be selected on Monday, although they won’t be announced until July 14. That means two more sleepless nights for the coaches who must name them, Andy Friend and Tim Walsh.
Almost certainly there will be no Wallabies in Friend’s team. Three of them tried out, Quade Cooper, Henry Speight and Nick Cummins, but other commitments and injuries have made it almost impossible for them to be included.
Many will see that as a flaw, that the best rugby players in the country couldn’t come through, but in fact it says something admirable about sevens as a game.
The physical demands are such that rugby talent alone — plus the fitness required to play 15s — aren’t enough. Next time, before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, when the Australian coach insists Wallabies have to spend at least four months in the sevens program, no one will think he is kidding.
But it is the women who are the truly remarkable story.
Of the five women who have featured in every tournament win on the journey to winning the World Series — Emilee Cherry, Charlotte Caslick, Alicia Quirk, Shannon Parry and Amy Turner — only Parry came from a pure rugby background. The rest had made their name in touch football. Others started off in athletics or rugby league or basketball or hockey.
In short, they’ve come from all over, drawn together by a dream, an Olympic dream. Where American golfer Rickie Fowler dissed the Olympics by saying “it would be a dream come true that I never dreamed of”, you don’t get the feeling he was speaking for the Australian women rugby players. Somewhere in their lives, the Olympics touched them. The rest of their story was simply finding a way to make it come true.
Not only are they going to Rio, they’ve been to Rio.
They went there in February — at the height of the mosquito season — for the Sao Paulo tournament and then spent a week in the Games’ host city familiarising themselves.
They’re all women of child-bearing age so the Zika virus wasn’t something to be taken lightly. But they listened to the experts, assessed the risks, wore long sleeves and plenty of repellent — and during the time they were there, saw one mosquito.
Soon, very soon, they will be announced as Olympians. No one, even after they have long retired, is ever a “former” Olympian. It stays with you for life.
So does spurning the title.
