At Doha goals Sarkozy takes a titillating kick

It was a meet of top sporting minds, but it was the colourful and incisive French ex-president Nicholas Sarkozy who stole the show with a speech which threw open challenges at administrators no less than Olympic supremo Lord Sebastian Coe. And just to let you know, he was speaking at a show produced by Richard Attias, present husband of his ex-wife Cecilia with whom Sarkozy has had a less  than cordial and more  than outrageous prelude to a divorce.

Not that the two were caught exchanging either glances or small talk, but Cecilia Attias sat in the front row, listening to the big talk on stage after her husband introduced the man she had once accused of being always surrounded by women offering him their phone numbers, as a distinguished speaker of the day.

Known to be a variant of the Richard Branson school of grandiose living, Sarkozy, who earlier in the year lost the Presidential race to Francois Hollande and stepped down as the French President, talked of how old, industrialised nations were holding to ransom the geography of global sports, not letting them travel to newer frontiers. “Why should the Olympics always be held in August,” he asked pointedly of Sebastian Coe,  suggesting a revamp of scheduling  programmes which Coe later said  was too ambitious to put into practice. Regaling the audience with a comprehensive and thought-provoking world view of sports competing with international relations and world governance, and France being one of the five permanent UN Security Council members, Sarkozy wondered why despite the millions of people on Earth being Muslims, no Arab State has had the same positioning at the United Nations. “The geography of major international events is an integral part of the thought we have to give to recalibrating world governance,” he said before pitching for Arab and Latin American nations having a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

This was Sarkozy’s first public speech after May this year and it did not seem he had grown out of the political domain or lost the fire, at least not with presenter Nick Gowing introducing him as “President Nicholas Sarkozy”. Known for his outrageous dalliances with sporting activities, like collapsing and being hospitalised after trying to run away from his bodyguards as President, at Doha he raced the minds with his clear, pointed and thought-provoking views on inclusivity of sport to a larger comity of nations.

“Sport is a complementary element between national identity and modern life,” he said, adding that Qatar has shown the “decisive and absolute change in perception without abandoning its “fidelity to Islam, its culture and tradition.” He talked of how sport has never found a seat in serious global discussions and the games get over the moment a big competition ends. This, he said, needs to change. “Everything grows to divide our people and to affirm our identities against each other. Sport is an antidote to this temptation.  Sport can transcend social cleavages, ethnic and religious. In a stadium, there is only one momentum -- that to share the emotions,” he added.

“I defend a rebalancing,” he said, congratulating Blatter for awarding the 2022 FIFA World cup to Qatar and patting himself on his back for working tirelessly for that to have happened. Quite another matter though that there is a cache of Qatari investment in Ligue 1 giants Paris Saint-Germain, while a wing of Doha-based Al Jazeera owns the rights to French football. For Sarkozy, though, that symbolised the shift in powerbase not just in sport but also world affairs, taking away the stranglehold on both from “a handful of old, industrial, western countries to newer, younger, more diverse countries.” It was just 20 minutes of undiluted titillation on sporting policy matters and Sarkozy was the master seducer without his famed three-day beard but with all the wit at his command.

Source: Published The Pioneer, Delhi, December 12, 2012