Shower me with love, not dirt
by Yeoh Siew Hoon
It’s hard not to be cynical these days.
There you were, nearly a year ago, at the scene when racing God (to some) Nelson Piquet crashed his car during the Singapore F1 race and you were all excited because you saw him get out of the car, hop on a bike and dash away like some action movie hero …
It was all so dramatic, so real.
And now you find it was all staged, yes, indeed like in some action movie and Renault has admitted they fixed the race, and that Piquet was told to crash so that his Spanish teammate Fernando Alonso would win.
Said Renault, “We will not dispute the recent allegations made by the FIA concerning the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix.â€
Boy, does that leave a bitter taste in my mouth. I am not even a fan and I am mad about it. I feel like such a sucker because I fell for it, like the thousands of others who showed up for the world’s first night race in Singapore last year.
But such is the dirty nature of sports these days when competition is being taken to the extremes and so much money is at stake and some people will do whatever it takes to win the pot of gold at the end of the tarnished rainbow.
This admission coming just a week before the F1 circus comes to town is not exactly good timing. I wonder how this will affect interest, which is pretty lackluster this year because the novelty of the first race is over.
Ticket sales are reported to be slower too due to the fact that more people have less money these days and F1 is not exactly the right sport for these more prudent times.
I remember when I was in Melbourne earlier this year and a journalist asked me what it was like to have F1 in Singapore and I said (naively), “Excitingâ€, and he said, “Oh, you’ll get sick of it by the third year.â€
Well, at the rate F1 is going, I reckon it might be sooner. The only thing I am looking forward to is the entertainment they are bringing on this year – from Beyonce to Simple Minds to Travis.
Who knows, maybe F1 will become the sideshow to these events?
And then there’s the Kanye West outburst at the MTV Music Video Awards – where he rushed onstage when Taylor Swift was accepting the award – and, as I write this, has apologised at least three times, once on the Jay Leno show.
And you wonder was it staged too? Did he do it for publicity?
Yes, nothing’s as innocent as it seems these days.
Even shower heads – apparently taking showers can be hazardous to your health because the shower heads contain loads of bacteria.
This really makes me mad because I love showers. It’s the first thing I do when I walk into a hotel room – I check out the shower head. The bigger, the better and the higher the pressure, the better the pleasure.
And now they tell me that instead of being showered with love, I am being showered with germs.
But what’s the alternative? No showers?
Yes, it’s a dirty world indeed.
Ian Jarrett
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