"It's A terribly distressing scene and one, I am sure, that is going to reopen all the debates about the safety of boxing," said Sky Sports commentator Ian Darke on Saturday night as the channel, for some reason known only to themselves, kept the cameras rolling at the end of a fight at the Royal Albert Hall to bring us live coverage of a team of medics trying to keep boxer Spencer Oliver alive.
"Many people have left the arena in a distraught state," said Darke. Perhaps Sky should have switched off their cameras and left with them. The scenes were horrific enough for the average viewer, but God help any members of the 22-year-old's family who were watching at home. What were Sky thinking of? Only the night before their news channel had carried a critical report of an American station which showed live pictures of a man committing suicide. The same station is probably entitled to respond by reporting on Sky's equally dubious ethics.
So, Darke was left with the task of finding the words, for 15 minutes, to describe the scene before him, where Oliver, lying motionless on the canvas, was being given adrenaline injections and oxygen after he had been knocked down in the 10th round of his title fight against Ukrainian Sergei Devakov. Earlier in the night he had made the now customary extravagant entry into the ring, to the accompaniment of a choir in evening dress, and left it unconscious, fitted with a neck brace and strapped to a stretcher on his way to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery where he had a three-hour operation to remove a blood clot from his brain.
"We can never rule out this sort of thing happening, that's almost the attractive thing about boxing," said Sky expert Barry McGuigan after Oliver had been taken away. "We love the danger - it's a very gratifying, satisfying sport." To non-boxing enthusiasts, events like Saturday night's make it increasingly difficult to believe there is an "attractive" side to the sport and, under the circumstances, McGuigan's remarks seemed more than a little crass.
To his credit, though, he has done more than most to improve safety and medical standards in the sport, through his role with the Professional Boxers' Association, and the scenes at the Royal Albert Hall must have been particularly painful for him, bringing back, as they surely did, distressing memories of his fight many years ago against Alimi Mustafa, when the Nigerian, who died some time later, was also stretchered unconscious from the ring.
"What's happened is awful, bearing in mind the safety standards we have in this country - they really do give you a very thorough examination and keep a record of all your brain scans and your MRI scans," said McGuigan. "The worry of course has to be that Spencer Oliver has developed a blood clot on the brain, in which case he would need an urgent operation to remove it," said Darke. Perhaps it says something of boxing that the sport's commentators can often spend as much time talking about brain scans, MRI scans and blood clots on the brain as they do about upper cuts and left hooks. The language of swimming has changed somewhat too in recent times . . . "specific gravity measurements", "the pH of urine samples", "testosterone precursors" . . . bewildering for those of us whose only scientific vocabulary is "bunsen burner".
Brian Smith, father of Michelle de Bruin, has had no option but to familiarise himself with such terms in the past week. On Saturday night he appeared on Kenny Live on RTE1 to defend his daughter's name following FINA's allegations against her, and he did so with some feeling.
"All of this goes back to Janet Evans and her initial outburst in Atlanta," claimed Pat Kenny, who then accused journalists of making judgements on Smith, based purely on circumstantial evidence. (One half-expected him to suggest that the American swimmer had somehow located de Bruin's urine samples in the lab in Barcelona where they are stored, and poured a naggin of whiskey in on top of them). Perhaps these were the same judgements most of us made about the three relatively unknown Chinese runners who beat Sonia O'Sullivan into fourth place in the 1993 World Championships 3,000 metres final. We had nothing to go on then but circumstantial evidence, but it didn't stop us suspecting that O'Sullivan had been cheated out of a medal. The views Evans expressed in Atlanta were no different to the ones most of us expressed in 1993 - we can't have it every way.
Evans's comments popped up on most of RTE's news reports on the de Bruin story last week, even though she has absolutely nothing to do with the current allegations, all of which suggested that RTE saw its role in all of this as defending the Irish woman against the big, baddy foreigners who were out to get her.
"She'd never let herself down, she'd never let her family down and she'd never let the people of Ireland down," said Brian Smith on the Kenny Show. For Michelle de Bruin and her family's sake, most of us desperately hope she hasn't.
St Patrick's Athletic didn't let any of their supporters down last Friday night when they won the league, in thrilling fashion, with a victory over Kilkenny City - while leaders Shelbourne lost, live on Network Two, to Dundalk.
"Well, that keeps you bang up to date," said commentator George Hamilton when he revealed that St Patrick's had taken the lead at Buckley Park . . . when, in fact, the PA announcer at Dundalk's ground had informed the viewers of the score five minutes earlier. Still, it was a magnificent climax to RTE's first season of televising League of Ireland matches live.
