The year in sport was a bit like the last year in sport, just a little bit more so. A little more feverish, a little more overblown, and generally a bit more like life might look lived entirely inside a cartoon operetta peopled by one-note superheroes whose time is divided up between exhilarating acts of high-definition athletic drama and trying to sell you a soft drink.
As is now apparently compulsory, the year was dominated by football, with the Brazil 2014 World Cup the centrepiece over six furious weeks in June and July. This was a tournament that had looked at one stage as though it might struggle to actually happen at all, beleaguered by infrastructure overspend and social unrest. But which in the end provided a fairly standard Fifa tournament, a familiar mix of glossily packaged homogeneity through which, invariably, football itself still manages to captivate and charm.
Germany won, becoming the first European country to win on South American soil, reward for a 12-year Bundesliga revamp that spawned the current generation of technically supreme academy products. Argentina were beaten finalists, condemned by overly cautious tactics to judder through the tournament with Lionel Messi an increasingly soft-pedalled influence.
This was a World Cup of vivid moments: Brazil’s tear-stained, astonishingly brittle 7-1 semi-final hammering by Germany in Rio de Janeiro; some wonderful counterattacking play by Colombia, Chile and Holland; and a record-equalling total of 177 goals, driven mainly by an unusually open group stage. England, almost entirely detached from the central spectacle, stank the place out once again, departing after five days of competitive football.
The Ryder Cup came and went in a flurry of polyester at Gleneagles, Europe taking the trophy for the third time in a row with a display of unrelenting power-golf, leading from the start to canter home by five points. Europe celebrated with the usual champagne-drenched speechifying. America celebrated with a public hatchet job by Phil Mickelson over the “management philosophy” of team captain Tom Watson.
Rory McIlroy was player of the year, winning the British Open, the World Golf Championship and the US PGA Championship in a run of brilliance that arrived shortly after he’d broken off his publicity-drenched engagement to Caroline Wozniacki in the course of a 10-minute phone call, the first five of which she apparently thought was a practical joke.
It was, just about, Australia’s year in Test cricket as Mitchell Johnson’s fast-bowling-for-the-ages saw the Aussies complete a 5-0 Ashes whitewash in Sydney before beating the World No 1 team South Africa over three Tests. Their subsequent annihilation by Pakistan in Dubai only added to the sense of a sport in a state of general flux. Elsewhere cricket continued to eat itself as the ECB, BCCI and ACB announced a deeply controversial plan to divvy up and parcel out international cricket more profitably among themselves in future. And the cricketing year ended on a note of terrible sadness as Phillip Hughes (pictured), a hugely popular 25-year-old of prodigious batting talent, died three days after being hit on the back of the neck by a bouncer while batting at the SCG. His death was a shattering moment for Australia, cricket and sport in general.
In Sochi the Winter Olympics passed off well enough. Team GB continued British sport’s well-funded ascent in the marginal, equipment-heavy Olympic disciplines, returning with its best medal haul since 1924. Elsewhere perhaps the moment of the games was the heartbreaking fall suffered by 15-year-old Russian ice skater and poster girl for the games Yulia Lipnitskaya. While the award for weirdest post-Sochi cheating story involving a celebrity musician goes to Vanessa Mae, whose presence in the women’s giant slalom drew headlines and, ultimately, the revelation that the violinist’s qualifying races had been fiddled to ensure she made it there, drawing a four-year competitive ban.
The Commonwealth Games pegged itself out across 11 well-attended days in Glasgow: England topped the medals table, Usain Bolt anchored Jamaica’s sprint relay gold in a tartan tam o’shanter and the star of the games was 16-year-old, 1.3-metre gymnast Claudia Fragapane, who came from nowhere to win four gold medals with a peculiar mix of street-dance waggling and high technique.
In 2014 the men who always dominate tennis dominated tennis a little less, with a slight tweak to the usual grand-slam roster as the likeable powerhouse Stanislas Wawrinka won the Australian Open and the 14th seed Marin Cilic entered from far left-field to win the US Open. On the women’s tour Serena Williams continues to creep up through the foothills of all-time greatdom, passing 200 weeks combined as world No 1 and adding another US Open to her swag-bag of slams.
The vast carbon-guzzling micro-planet that is Formula One continued to circle the globe dispensing its week-long jolly of billionaire’s gadabout and high-grade engineering. Lewis Hamilton won the driver’s title for the second time, putting in a display of sustained excellence behind the wheel of his Mercedes and even managing to smile nicely afterwards.
Ireland won rugby union’s Six Nations, a tournament that saw the world’s favourite celebrity genius fly-half Brian O’Driscoll retire, Scotland lose 51-3 to Wales and England continue to play like a brilliantly lumbering parody of England playing rugby.
In cycling, Italy’s Vincenzo Nibali won the 101st Tour de France, having led the race for 18 days out of 21. Ronnie O’Sullivan, who often looks like he could beat the opposition on one leg, beat the opposition on one leg by winning the UK Snooker Championship with a broken ankle, while also knocking in a lucrative 147 break.
Meanwhile, in the world of sport-related scandal and gerrymandering Fifa continues to lead the way here as they do on the pitch: Michael Garcia’s report into corruption surrounding the award of the 2018 and 2022 World cups to Russia and Qatar rumbles on like a distant storm (a storm full of corruption, favours, free handbags and untraced bank transfers). So much so that at the end of 2014 Fifa finds itself caught in a slew of allegations, its bid process a cross between farce and and partial intransigence. No change there, then.
