To NATO, sport is not only a big business but a very dirty, ruthless and lucrative business, Declan Hayes writes.

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Although NATO’s blockade of Russia meant she could not have attended Wimbledon even had she wanted to, I doubt Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova would have enjoyed it.

Zakharova, if her recent pronouncements on NATO’s blockade of Russian sport and, even more outrageously on that of Belarus are anything to go by, is of the old school where one does not cheer or applaud a double fault but, in traditionally true British fashion, keeps a stiff and fair-minded upper lip. By contrast, Albion’s present Wimbledon lot, egged on by MI5’s BBC, get their rocks off booing 20 year-old Belarusian women for no other reason than they were born in Belarus.

These are the same English savages who drown out the haka of Tonga (population 100,000) and whose football fans would be a national embarrassment if today’s British sports influencers did embarrassment. As would the forelock-tipping Irish, who have long forsaken the good manners they once displayed with Munster’s legendary haka clashes against the All Blacks.

Because I too am of the old school, I was happy for Serbians that their own Novak Djokovic almost prevailed in the men’s final, just as I was happy that Syria’s football team had a modestly successful run against the odds some years ago and that Syrians and Gazans prevailed in Arab song contests.

Because everyone, even Serbs, deserves to enjoy the sunny side of the street every once in a while, that and that alone is why I am happy Djokovic, whom the tennis-loving French saw was a real a stand-up guy, has done so well, even if he fell at Wimbledon’s last hurdle this time The Serbs, as Zakharova knows and as many of Stephen Karganovic’s excellent articles regularly remind us, were subjected to non-stop NATO saturation bombing by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the two most notorious Class A war criminals of Djokovic’s childhood. And that vindictive NATO terrorism continues against Serbia’s children to this very day.

As well as having to opine on Serbia’s ongoing suffering, Zakharova must also address Europe’s fanatical obsession with banning Belarus from France’s 2024 Paralympics, something former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev quite rightly preferred not to expound on as, also being old school, he’d regard NATO picking on Special Olympians as not quite being cricket, just not the done thing.

But because to NATO, sport is not only a big business but a very dirty, ruthless and lucrative business, the Special Olympians of Belarus and Russia, as well as all women, are fair game. America’s unregulated sports’ supplements business, for example, is worth a staggering $24 billion in annual revenue and, though that helps to explain American drug-saturated sporting successes as well as the rise of NATO’s trans industry (which Russia has recently banned), it is also indicative of the huge stakes that ride on sports which Wall Street regards as part of its entertainment industry and where the fan base is just one further cash stream to be drained dry.

Given that Belarus was the only football league that remained operative during the Covid lock down, NATO might figure their business model just does not need the competition a more general interest in their tennis players, their Special Olympians or their footballers bring.

The New York Times, for example, is consolidating its sports coverage, which will now be covered by The Athletic, a website the NYT acquired for $550 million. This will allow the NYT’s subscription holders to still get their baseball results, while the NYT’s own crew win Pulitzers denigrating the athletes of Belarus and more serious business competitors as well.

Those more serious competitors include the Gulf State countries, who are currently snapping up Europe’s top football clubs and football players and who are making NATO rags like The Guardian squeal by setting up rival golf outfits to challenge NATO’s sporting hegemony.

The end result of their massive investments is that the Gulf State countries are becoming serious contenders in the business of sport, just as their airlines are major players in the aviation industry.

Unlike Kerry Packer’s rebel cricket tours, we can expect the Gulf’s Wimbledon Effect to be more permanent at least until such time that the U.S. Marine Corps invade Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to slaughter them or The Guardian, the NYT and NATO’s other media outlets shame them out of existence for not being as sportsman-like as the Serbophobic Wimbledon lot, who shout down Tongans when they are not otherwise disgracing themselves.

No matter how ignorantly NATO’s tennis courts might treat them, Serbia’s Novak Djokovic, Belarus’s Victoria Azarenka and very many more of their compatriots can rest assured that, because the Gulf State countries, China and some other increasingly important arenas and cash streams will always remain open to them, it might still be game, set, match to Zakharova, Medvedev and women everywhere who want fair play in tennis, in the Olympics and in all the world’s other sports and arenas that NATO traditionally throttled.