Rugby priorities shift and scar World Cup

This weekend, rugby confirms its place among the debased, increasingly cynical, and commercially compassed sports of our world. A sport that once celebrated an admirable set of values has but one now, and it does not always lead to admirable outcomes.

By cancelling games at World Cup 2019 in Japan because of an entirely predictable typhoon — Super Typhoon Hagibis — it lays its priorities on the table.

Any patronising talk of player or supporter safety is guff; if that was a genuine issue, an active matter of conscience, then the competition would not have been held in Japan during its unavoidable, inevitable typhoon season.

This is not a reflection on Japan, which has been a generous host, but rather a recognition of weather as a primal force — one even more powerful than rugby’s commercial ambitions.

Tragically, this fiasco may be a precursor for something much more dangerous — the Qatar 2022 World Cup will be held in even more inhumane, but predictable conditions,conditions that have cost the lives of hundreds of migrants working in searing heat on World Cup infrastructure.

International rugby schedules could not be mixed-and-matched to allow pre-typhoon scheduling of the World Cup, so player welfare, and the huge expenses of tens of thousands of travelling fans, were regarded as acceptable collateral damage.

Pragmatically, next year’s Olympic Games, in Tokyo, will end on August 9, months before typhoon season, though the credibility of that once-great festival is even more stretched than that of the Rugby World Cup.

It is coincidental that the beneficiaries of the cancelled games are among the world’s most powerful rugby nations. Italy’s Sergio Parisse articulated it precisely, if sadly, when he declared: “If New Zealand needed four or five points against us, it would not have been cancelled.

It is ridiculous... that there was no plan B, because it isn’t news that typhoons hit Japan.” Scotland, whose do-or-go-home game with Japan may or may not go ahead tomorrow morning, have threatened legal action if Hagibis decides their fate.

Rugby’s administrators, however, can deflect attention by pointing to athletics and cycling and particularly to the role of sportswear superpower Nike.

That American company has captured international athletics, and many influential commentators, as if the entire jamboree is but an adjunct to their marketing department. Nike has been forced to close its notorious Oregon Project, following the four-year doping ban of Alberto Salazar. UK Athletics chief Neil Black , also quiton foot of the Salazar ban.

Amazingly, that level of disruption is almost business as usual for Nike. After all, Lance Armstrong, possibly the greatest drug cheat of all time, was the company’s poster boy for many years. It is hard not to imagine that the company’s mantra — ‘Just Do It’ — applied whether the doing was legal or not.

None of this matters if you think sport is just chasing a ball around a field. But it is much, much more. Sport is a priceless tool for transferring enduring values across generations. Ina time when that challenge gets harder and harder, rugby’s new priorities will not make it any easier.