I didn't head this post as Off Topic because I don't believe it is. If you will read the following article to its conclusion, excusing in the first paragraphs the unfamiliarity of some of the names of British sports personalities and locations, I think you will see its relevance to many of the people and issues on this forum.

Electronic Telegraph, ISSUE 1675 Monday 27 December 1999

Disaster fails to snuff out the flickering flame of hope By Robert Philip

THE images of devastation will be there to haunt us forever: the tangled fuselage of a BEA Elizabethan aircraft strewn across a Munich runway on a snowy February night in 1958; the tortured, terrified faces of those trapped behind the Hillsborough fencing after being herded through the gates to hell on FA Cup semi-final day 1989; the 11 empty seats at the memorial service for the Israeli athletes and coaches slaughtered by Black September terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympics; football spectators, their hair and clothes afire, fleeing the inferno at Valley Parade, Bradford, where blazing rafters crashed down on those unable to escape in 1985; the twisted handrails and mountain of bodies blocking the accursed stairway 13 at Ibrox Stadium at the end of the 1971 Old Firm Ne'erday derby; the collapsed terrace wall of Heysel under which 41 Juventus fans lay crushed or trampled to death in May 1985.

We will never know the exact tally of those who have perished in pursuit of their chosen sport in the 20th century - 301 people, for example, were killed during rioting at a Peruvian league football match in 1964 and there have been rumours (and denials) of similar disasters in the former Soviet Union, Africa and Asia - but boxing, motor racing, equestrianism, horse racing, motorcycling, mountaineering or whatever, have all been cursed by tragedy in one form or another.

Nine years before eight members of Sir Matt's beloved Busby Babes, plus 15 coaches and journalists, perished on the Tarmac at Munich when Flight 609 crashed on take-off after a refuelling stop on the return journey from a European Cup tie in Belgrade, 18 players from Torino, the finest club team in the history of Italian football, had been among 31 killed when the plane carrying them home from a game in Portugal hit a hillside at Superga, on the outskirts of Turin. Comprising the bulk of the Italian international side, Torino, chasing their fifth successive league title, were four points clear on the day of the accident. The club's youth team won the last four games of the season against the under-18 sides fielded by rivals, but Torino would never again be the irresistible force of the late 1940s.

I have visited the Basilica di Superga in the company of one-time Torino idol Denis Law, where the likenesses of the players are engraved in marble and an eternal flame keeps watch over each grave. The church is one of the most poignant spots on earth. The Busby Babes' memorial, in contrast, is the living sculpture which adorns Old Trafford every match day. The old man would be well chuffed that those who followed Duncan Edwards and his ill-fated chums will enter the new millennium regarded by all as the best club side in the world. In its own way, that is as fitting a monument as Torino's silently beautiful basilica.

The disasters at Glasgow, Bradford, Brussels and Sheffield were due to a variety of factors; 66 fans died at Ibrox when large numbers of Rangers fans, resigned to defeat, headed down the steep 80 feet incline of exit 13 before the end of the game. Suddenly, the stadium erupted in a mighty roar heralding Colin Stein's late equaliser and those spectators seeking to turn back up the staircase to join the celebrations met the main mass of fans streaming out at the final whistle with terrible consequences.

Forty were burned, asphyxiated by smoke or trampled to death at Bradford where the main grandstand - seating 4,000 spectators hoping to witness the club's promotion to Division Two - was consumed in minutes by raging flames. A sobbing policeman described the trauma of standing by helplessly whilst "people wandered the scene in a daze calling out the names of their loved ones". The cause? A carelessly discarded cigarette, in all probability.

Ninety-three lost their lives at Hillsborough (more have since been allowed to pass away rather than continue to 'live' wired up to hospital machinery in a suspended state of animation). We are still awaiting the truth; at the time Yorkshire police claimed the disaster was triggered by the late arrival of 3,000-4,000 Liverpool supporters 10 minutes before the game against Nottingham Forest kicked off. Families of the victims insist their loved ones had the life squeezed out of them after being herded into a tiny section of the Leppings Lane terraces.

The crumbling and antiquated Heysel Stadium was unfit to host an important game such as the European Cup final, yet no harm would have befallen the 41 Juventus fans had a sizeable body of Liverpool supporters not attacked them with flagpoles, hunks of concrete, metal batons fashioned from supposed safety barriers, bottles and cans.

If Ben Johnson besmirched the Olympics with his steroid-fuelled dash to 'victory' in the 100 metres at Seoul in 1988, Arab extremists desecrated the idealised notion of the Games with the slaughter of 11 innocent Israelis just a few miles down the road from the remains of Dachau.

The 1972 Olympics should have been cancelled there and then, instead of which IOC president Avery Brundage decreed that they should continue as planned. "Should they go ahead?" an American fencer replied to a radio interviewer. "Don't ask me - I'm through to the finals."

There was more, so much more: the abuse and control of Muhammad Ali by his 'religious' advisers; the concept of athletics, swimming, weight-lifting and cycling ridiculed by the use of drugs (even the death of Briton Tommy Simpson has acted as no warning to those who pedal and peddle on the Tour de France); and television money's increasingly intrusive influence. But we cannot prepare to welcome the 21st century without acknowledging just a few of those who have made the world a better place through their indomitable human spirit.

There were genuine heroes like Graham Salmon who, alas, did not live to experience the new millennium after finally admitting defeat in his four-decade-plus battle against cancer. The disease took away both eyes and his left leg, but no matter how hard it tried it could never take away his will to live, and so he became a world-class sprinter, high jumper and golfer. Unlike Johnson and his odious ilk, Graham took drugs not to run faster or jump higher, but merely to control the unbelievable pain which accompanied his every breath.

Bob Champion did beat cancer, just as his noble equine partner, Aldaniti, recovered from three potentially life-threatening leg injuries to win the Grand National in 1981, the fairy-tale of all Aintree fairy-tales. Immortalised in the film Champions, Bob and Aldaniti were made for one another, the horse refusing to accept the medical verdict that he would soon be saddled in the great paddock in the sky, and the rider refusing to let go of his boyhood dream of riding the winner of the Grand National even as he was undergoing the most ghastly chemotherapy treatment.

But just as the Olympics have come to represent all that is evil in the sporting 20th century through greed, corruption, cheating and a whole lot more besides, so the flame of hope will never quite be extinguished. How could it be otherwise when Mary Peters is in our midst? The 1972 Munich Games should never have been permitted to continue, yet if any athlete of any generation has deserved to stand atop the podium with a gold medal around their neck, then it is surely our pentathlon champion of 27 years ago. Fourth at Tokyo in 1964, a modest ninth in Mexcio City four years later, Peters was 33 and nearing the end of her career when she finally triumphed in Munich. Mary may not be the greatest Olympic champion, but by heck she just might be the nicest.

As a child, Wilma Rudolph wore a heavy brace on her left leg after being struck by double pneumonia and scarlet fever. "Every Saturday when I was a kid," she recalled, "my mom would take me on a bus from our home in Clarksville, Tennessee, to a hospital in Nashville 60 miles away for treatment on my leg. During the following week my brothers and sisters would take turns massaging it. If it wasn't for my family, I would never have been able to walk properly, let alone run." But when the brace was eventually removed, shortly after Rudolph's 11th birthday, run she did; like the wind. Nine years later, at the 1960 Rome Olympics, she won gold medals in the 100 metres, 200m and 4 x 100m relay, establishing herself as the darling of the Games and the fastest woman on earth.

Boyhood friends Shuhei Nishida and Sueo Oe were the silver and bronze medallists, respectively, in the pole vault at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, despite the fact that they were tied in second place when darkness fell and the competition was terminated. For reasons that are unclear to this day, officials decided Nishida was the outright runner-up and relegated Oe to third place. "When we returned to Japan, Oe and myself decided to cut our medals in half then rejoin them half-silver, half-bronze," Nishida said. To this day, the results of the two men's symbolic act are known as the medals of eternal friendship.

Tanzanian John Stephen Akhwari did not win a medal of any description in the marathon at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, yet he won the hearts of the world by finishing stone last. An hour and more after Mamo Wolde, of Ethiopia, crossed the finish line to take the gold, only a few thousand spectators - presumably with nothing better to do at the end of the day's athletics programme - sat dotted around the huge stadium.

They were to be rewarded with one of the most moving and courageous moments in Olympic history when the approaching sound of police whistles and motorcycle engines heralded the entrance into the arena of Akhwari, his right leg bloodied and heavily bandaged, and reduced to walking pace by assorted cramps.

Clapping rhythmically - the noise gradually reaching a peak which would have done justice to a crowd of 200,000 - the Mexican spectators carried the little Tanzanian around the track on his lonely lap of honour. "Why bother? Why didn't you quit?" Akhwari was asked when he hobbled across the line, his face contorted in a mixture of agony and ecstacy. "You do not understand," he mumbled softy through parched lips, "my country did not send me to Mexico to start the race; they sent me to finish the marathon."

In a century in which Ben Johnson came to epitomise every sporting evil, John Stephen Akhwari was that rare phenomenon - last among equals.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), December 27, 1999

Answers

I don't have any doubt that people will risk their lives for useless, idiotic pursuits; that's quite clear from watching The Discovery Channel's series on morons who get lost on a mountain while skiing, and the like. The question is what they will do when they are faced with real, life-threatening problems in their everyday lives.

-- Steve Heller (stheller@koyote.com), December 27, 1999.

Steve, do you ever cease to be a pontificating asshole?

What makes you so frigging high and mighty to make posts like this every day condemning everyone on the planet expect you and your Super Brain. Me thinks your an insecure little worm of a man in real life and the internet is some kind of pseudo intellectual Roman Gladiator sparring ring where you can bully and browbeat all the "lesser mortals". Your arrogance shows, dude.

Why don't you just take a damn look in the mirror before you go around accusing everyone of their shortcomings???

-- (don't@go away mad... etc), December 27, 1999.

Old Git,

Great post...hope that there are many who rise above the fray of this Y2K scenario to excel in the face of adversity. Good job OG!

-- TM (mercier7@pdnt.com), December 27, 1999.

I don't have any doubt that people will risk their lives for useless, idiotic pursuits; that's quite clear from watching The Discovery Channel's series on morons who get lost on a mountain while skiing, and the like. The question is what they will do when they are faced with real, life-threatening problems in their everyday lives.

-- Steve Heller (stheller@koyote.com), December 27, 1999.

We will see what we always see in times of war or great disaster. There will be those who will show us the very finest in human behavior to which we should all aspire and there will be those who'll show us the utter worst in human behavior for whom a rope and a nearby tree is the only appropriate response. All of the rest of us will fall somewhere in between.

To which end of this spectrum do you aspire to Mr. Heller?

.........Alan.

The Prudent Food Storage FAQ, v3.5

http://www.providenceco-op.com

-- A.T. Hagan (athagan@netscape.net), December 27, 1999.

What makes you so frigging high and mighty to make posts like this every day condemning everyone on the planet expect you and your Super Brain.

I guess I'm just tired of seeing irrelevant people like sports "heroes" treated as though they had some significance, just as I am tired of being lied to by the government and business. Personally, I consider heroes to be those who risk their lives for something meaningful, like putting out fires or rescuing people who are in trouble through no fault of their own. Or who spend their time finding cures for diseases or inventing new ways of organizing society to reduce the toll that governments take on the people of the world. If that makes me "high and mighty", then so be it.

-- Steve Heller (stheller@koyote.com), December 27, 1999.

We will see what we always see in times of war or great disaster. There will be those who will show us the very finest in human behavior to which we should all aspire and there will be those who'll show us the utter worst in human behavior for whom a rope and a nearby tree is the only appropriate response. All of the rest of us will fall somewhere in between.

To which end of this spectrum do you aspire to Mr. Heller?

To the latter, of course. That's why I've spent so much time trying to warn people about the possibility of Y2K disasters, as well as telling them exactly how to qualify for and set up an amateur radio station so they can contribute to emergency communications. I've also paid out of my own pocket for solar backup power for a 2m repeater that I can't even access myself, and volunteered to provide emergency communications for the local hospital. This does not exhaust the list of my community-oriented activities, by the way. Do you want more?

-- Steve Heller (stheller@koyote.com), December 27, 1999.

I expect it to be a year of surprises. People are so wonderfully/damnably hard to predict.

There will be people who would be expected to proceed with gallantry and grace, who will shrivel and die, and there will be people who we thought only capable of the worst cowardice who will shine and become heroes.

Improving your odds (by prepping) does only that: it improves your odds...there are no guarentees.

The message that Old Git brings with her post, is correct. People can rise above anything, if they choose to do so. If enough people make that choice, we will get thru next year. If not, then all the prepping in the world won't be enough to get us through what's to come.

Keeping my fingers crossed.....

-- Bokonon (bok0non@my-Deja.com), December 27, 1999.

Steve, it was a sports column in the sports section of a British newspaper, hence it was about sports personalities. Coming from a family of sports nuts, I grew up hating sports--and I still do. Nobody thinks sports "stars" are more irrelevant than I do. But there is a message of INDOMITABLE SPIRIT in this article which transcends the sports milieu.

That being said, Don't go away mad didn't exactly typify the spirit I had in mind.

Could we PLEASE keep this thread positive? Thank you.

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), December 27, 1999.

FWIW...I have come to realize that in any endeavor, talent will only take you so far. It is hard work and sacrifice that make the Micheal Jordans and Deion Sanders what they are. Gifted athletes are a dime a dozen...geniuses abound, so do musical and artistic prodigies. For the most part, it's the character of champions that set them apart. It's that trait that gives them the opportunity to "make history", or "do the impossible".

-- TM (mercier7@pdnt.com), December 27, 1999.