Say it ain't so, Renault

By DAVID GREEN

In October 1919, one of the world's first modern sports -- baseball, already 43 years old if you count the origin of today's National League as a starting point, even older if you date from the establishment of the first fully professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, in 1869 -- suffered a scandal of historic proportions when the Chicago White Sox of the American League were accused of deliberately losing the World Series to Cincinnati.

It took nearly a year for the rumors of skullduggery to result in any sort of consequence.

Fast-forward to today, almost 100 years after the baseball scandal, when another modern sport -- automobile racing -- is embroiled in a scandal that gnaws at the legitimacy of its purpose.

The scandal is in Formula One, but American race fans, most of them attuned to NASCAR stock car racing, should take notice, because the entire sport is smeared by the actions of an F1 team in one of last year's races.

Renault, the French auto manufacturer which owns a Formula One team, has sacked the two leaders of the team and has stated that it will not contest accusations that ING Renault F1 Team conspired to manipulate the outcome of the 2008 Singapore Grand Prix, won by Renault driver Fernando Alonso.

In Great Britain, where F1 is every bit as big a deal as NASCAR is in Charlotte, the press are apoplectic. Phrases such as "one of the darkest days" and "worst single piece of cheating in the history of sport" have punctuated the coverage in publications such as The Times of London.

There are questions already being raised about the impact of the "fixed" race on last year's championship titles for drivers and manufacturers, and about whether litigation may be utilized as a means of redress of perceived and/or real grievances.

Other scribes have been less dramatic than that, discussing in less hysterical terms what the World Motor Sport Council may do to punish the team and what ramifications there may be for the two drivers involved in the cheating -- Alonso and Nelson Piquet, who has admitted deliberately crashing in the early stages to trigger a strategic advantage for Alonso versus the faster Ferrari and McLaren entries.

But make no mistake -- it's a tenuous time for racing.

Revelation of the Renault scandal comes in almost dead-solid synchronicity with uproar in Indianapolis over one of the icons of drag racing supposedly losing a race on purpose to help another driver's chances to make the cutoff for the NHRA Countdown to its season championship titles, and tumult in NASCAR over the selection of the 12 drivers who will battle each other in the Chase for the Cup.

Renault's admission of cheating comes at the same time John Force angrily responds to a competitor's assertions that he threw a race, while Carl Edwards candidly admits, sure, he would allow a teammate to pass him and even allow him to win if it were in the best interests of the team.

Never mind the dismissals of racing as "nothing but cars going around in circles"; race fans can question, with just as much validity, the "point" of other sports:

Football -- two groups of men butting and battling against each other, in order to advance a leather object up and down a field arbitrarily set at 100 yards long;

Baseball -- players attempting to hit a small ball with a wooden bat, only to run around a diamond-shaped course and, hopefully, end up where they started;

Basketball -- players running up and down a court, attempting to throw a ball into a steel-rimmed "basket" more often and with greater efficiency than an opposing group.

None of these activities has any world-historical significance, except in that they have all risen to great popularity and importance in a society increasingly freed from the life-and-death concerns of a more primitive time.

They have all become enormous businesses now, these sports and games. But their immense popularity and the passion of their fans remain based on the presumption that the contests are fair and square, not predetermined, staged or manipulated.

That presumption is now, at best, suspect. At worst, it is obsolete.

How to -- uh -- "fix" this mess?

Baseball, in 1920, imposed harsh penalties on the players implicated -- but never convicted -- in the "Black Sox" scandal. Baseball turned the emerging mass media into an ally as well as a watchdog adversary and rode the heroic exploits of players such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and others into a triumph over its scandal.

That sport has had less success dealing with modern questions raised about the validity of competition based on performance-enhancing substances and issues of flawed character. The landscape of public opinion and media attention is much altered from that of the 1920s.

Racing may be in a quagmire from which it will be unable to extricate itself. Its management has conspired with a select few to turn all major forms of the sport into team-centered competition. Many observers and students of the sport, along with a good many competitors, have decried this trend as something that undermines the competitive integrity of racing.

It will be interesting to see what the leaders of motor sport do in this time. I only hope we will witness some sort of Ruthian miracle, and that we will not be instead witnessing the ignoble end of the racing world as we know it.