Force Majeure... Life Is A Calculated Risk!

Brendan Gallagher recalls other cases when extreme weather or random events have affected sport

- Brendan Gallagher

THE great and the good, not to mention all the usual suspects on twitter, have been getting their knickers in a twist this week over the cancelled games in Japan at the World Cup but the rugby world – and the sporting world generally – is deluding itself if it believes it can truly insure itself against extreme weather and random events. Occasionally it all goes pear-shaped.

You can get some serious winds this time of year in Japan – like you can here for that matter, anybody remember October 16, 1987? – but the Japanese Grand Prix has been staged in the same time slot since 1963 and has never once been cancelled.

When it comes to tropical storms and typhoons/hurricanes you can’t predict anything as Michael Fish famously discovered. Some years you have none at all and when they do appear they never go where they are initially predicted.

And remember the greater world of rugby voted for Japan to stage RWC2019 ten years ago, I don’t recall too many people voicing many concerns in the interim. Stuff happens and you deal with as best you can while remembering at all times that sport is sport and should never be confused with real life.

I was reporting at the World Cup semi-final at Durban in 1995 when that monsoon – their word for a typhoon – came from absolutely nowhere. Of course the game should never have taken place, the conditions were farcical but equally everybody knows the game had to take place for South Africa to make the final. A cancellation would have seen them knocked out.