And we're off! Sort of!

And we're off!

Sport begins in the UK on what people are calling Happy Monday. (Tomorrow is Rueful Tuesday, then its Wait-A-Minute Wednesday, Think-Again-Thursday, F**k-This-Friday, and Stay-At-Home Again Saturday.)

For every life that's being lost during this crisis there's a couple of hundred thousand pounds sterling that's way more important. and anyway it won't half cheer us up! Bye bye Granny, hello French 2000 Guineas! Woohoo!

Yes the first reentry into the sporting calendar is that perennial yawn horse-racing. You remember that, right? It was the bits of Grandstand that you used to turn off every Saturday afternoon. Little men sitting on mighty beasts and cracking them on their flanks is not my idea of fun. I've even stopped having a flutter on the Grand National cos £10 of my money is riding on your back, Neddy,  then you're  more likely to see a curtain being drawn around you than the finishing line.

Incidentally if they shot the jockey too, I swear to God they'd be jumping those horses over those fences with a bit more care.

Horses, I'm told, love horse racing just as much as we do. Really? Funny how they're never in the crowd watching isn't it? They might have helped at Cheltenham - if we could've kept everyone a horse-width apart we could saved 10,000 lives right there.

Anyone, the gee-gees will be galloping around some empty acres for our amusement and penury from today and that's just grand. And it's as meaningless as a Matt Hancock stat.

Snooker is starting too. What you need when a respiratory infection grips the globe is a small room with a few blokes coughing in it just to reassure you. Okay there'll be no audience, but they'll still be taking all the necessary precautions. Washing your hands between every shot is going to take its toll but for those of us old enough to remember it'll just feel like Dott v Ebdon.

Of course the German footy has been going for a bit now and I have to say there's been nothing more impressive than the likes of Sancho and Thuram using their platform to express their support for #BlackLivesMatter and justice for George Floyd. Of course there's nothing condemning a racist assassination for getting you an instant yellow card. Nice one, ref. If Trump has his way you'll get sent off in the MLS for wearing a t-shirt that says 'That Hitler? Not a big fan.'

People will always say keep politics out of sport. Bollocks. Sport is a brilliant platform for political statements and so it should be. Ask Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and Peter Norman come to that. Ask Jesse Owens for God's sake. Ask Colin Kaepernick. Ask the entire country of South Africa.

There are now young black sportspeople pointing out that Floyd's death is the ghoulish and wicked extreme in the everyday world of casual racism that dogs not just the US but here too. Rashford, Brewster, Cori Gauff, Naomi Osaka. They are not sucking it up and neither should they.

And Lewis Hamilton (yeah, I know Formula 1 isn't really a sport) but Hamilton has addressed this head-on and pointed to the silence amongst an almost exclusively white world of motor racing. His fellow drivers have responded.

Others have suggested that the hashtag #blacklivesmatter is somehow unacceptable. These 'reasonable' folk who say 'No, no, no ... ALL lives matter.' As if by pointing out the atrocious inequality of their income and treatment, and the recurrent obscenity of cops killing black men, they are somehow privileging themselves. As Rhian Brewster tweeted 'We don't want special privilege. A level playing field is all we've been crying for.'

'All Lives Matter' is just people unaffected by prejudice, and unaware of their own privilege, telling black people to go away and get a better slogan and then we can talk. It's patronising, irrelevant bullshit.

Meanwhile back in Blighty and all is well. Thanks to Dominic Cummings and his litany of gutless apologists - do these men have remotely activated electrical filaments in their urethras or are they just gutless worms? - Britons can get back to being proper Britons again, using our British common sense. We can throw ourselves into the sea and summon an air ambulance. We can crowd onto beaches, disperse a bit more Corona and then leave said beaches looking like Carrie Syminds front room after she'd confronted Boris Johnson about the Arcuri affair.

We can do what we like because Dom can. For a while there we were all pulling together, keeping our two metres, thinking of others, not least the poor sods we clap every Thursday night. Then we realised that we don't really care about other people. Rules are for other people, right?

We look at our sportspeople - often they are young, inexperienced, brilliant and well-paid - and when they f**k up we haul them over the coals. If they're black and they f**k up, even worse. They're role models, you see. They should be using their position to encourage goodness and decency.

But if you're in government, you don't need to worry about being a role-model. You can lie, relentlessly; you can father children and abandon them; you can hang out with European neo-fascists; you can take an infected person the length of the country and make up the most laughable excuses for driving them out on a birthday trip and it's fine because what you do doesn't particularly matter. You're not a 20-year old footballer with ten England caps.

Except that's not true. If the person who makes the rules breaks the rules then the rules stay broken. Because trust is broken. We all know that. No amount of horse-racing will take that fact away.