Michael Scott | April 10, 2018
Ball-Tampering, And How To Do It On Two Wheels
COLUMN
It’s been torrid fortnight for sports scandals. Thanks to the Australian cricket team and the merciless revelations of long-lens TV cameras.
I realize cricket means nothing in the U.S., but bear with me. There are chunks of the Anglophone world where much of the population regard the once-upon-a-time “gentleman’s game” as of paramount importance. After the recent scandal, during a test-match series against South Africa, the Australian prime minister even weighed in to the chorus of embarrassed condemnation.
The cheating involved tampering with the ball—specifically roughing up one side of it (a cricket ball has a seam down the middle) and polishing the other. If the bowler puts a stabilizing spin on it, then the aerodynamic drag from the rougher side causes the ball to swerve in the air, hopefully foxing the waiting batsman.
In the past, among other things and often controversially, players have used suntan cream taken off their faces, “polished” the ball on their trouser zips, and used sugary saliva taken from sucked peppermints to achieve this side-to-side imbalance. In Cape Town, however, long-lens TV cameras carefully filmed a player using a square of yellow sandpaper. When he realized he’d been rumbled, with a series of big-screen replays, he shoved the sandpaper into his underpants. This too was filmed, and endlessly repeated.
There followed a farrago of lies followed by lame excuses, severe penalties and disgraced dismissals of the captain, vice-captain and guilty ball-rubber, all marinated in floods of unseemly tears.
You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.
Do we care about cricket? No death-defying courage, and cripplingly slow—five days compared with MotoGP’s 45 minutes.
But we are lagging. Cheating is one thing, but gamesmanship and the thrill of attendant publicity is an integral part of top-level sports, including Formula 1: illegal fuel, deliberate crashes, team orders, and serious espionage (McLaren on Ferrari).
And motorcycling? Nothing worth headlines, let alone a sneaking admiration. Or the prime minister.
Recently there have been some genuine mistakes—Moto2 teams using un-homologated oil or clutches, and in Moto3 an unhomologated ECU.
Most stories come from production racing, and entail surreptitious slipping in of shims to improve ground clearance.
There’ve been illegal pistons and cams, dodgy material upgrades and so on, but today, thanks to good policing it’s almost unheard of.
In the past, some blind eyes were turned.
In the lean years of the 500s, when MV Agustas galloped away from dis-spirited Nortons, etc, grid numbers were hugely boosted by much quicker Yamaha two-stroke twins. To be legal, they had to be bigger than 350s. A crankshaft mod and a thicker base gasket would make the size—but how many riding “351cc” Yamahas actually did it?
More to the point, since the 250 and 350 Yamahas were almost identical apart from exhaust bore size, how many so-called 250s were actually disguised 350s? Or 351s?
These, however, were essentially midfield matters.
Proper skulduggery needs to be top level.
Funnily enough, or perhaps not, some rumors involve the most ruthless of factories, Honda. Perhaps it’s better not to name the two riders involved, for one would later become very famous. The American pair were sharing a factory endurance bike, and heading for victory. A bad result, for the bike was illegal. The second rider was instructed to make sure it didn’t finish. Apparently, blowing it up proved very difficult.
Honda again, in 1982, after three years of horrendous humiliation with the clever but badly outclassed oval-pistoned NR500, HRC Honda put new discovery Freddie Spencer on it for a single outing at Silverstone. He was up to fifth and eyeing the leaders before a premature retirement. It probably wasn’t over-size, as some suggested. More likely it had never been intended to finish, and had started with a light enough fuel load for a last hurrah.
And more recently? Aside from a couple of drug busts (superbike’s Nori Haga and GP’s Anthony West—both the result of misjudged use of over-the-counter medication)—I can only recall one.
It happened at Qatar in 2004, and like all good scandals involved the top man: Valentino Rossi.
The new desert track was dusty, so his crew chief Jerry Burgess and his Australian cohorts decided a bit of rubber leading off his row-three starting slot might help his launch, and they laid a decent-size stripe by spinning up a scooter wheel. Or were they, as Burgess insisted, just marking the track to help Rossi’s aim into the first corner?
Either way, Rossi was put to the back of the grid, and rode like a demon to get up to fourth in five laps before having a rare crash. He called Race Direction “bastardos” on TV, and forever after blamed his rival Sete Gibernau, saying “he will never win another race.”
At least he was right about that.CN