Talking points NEWS 21
7 May 2022 THE WEEKBoris Becker: the fall of tennis’s golden boy
“Politics has always
been the systematic
organisation of hatreds.”
Henry Adams, quoted in
The Washington Post“Every generation,
civilisation is invaded
by barbarians. We call
them ‘children’.”
Hannah Arendt, quoted
on The Bulwark“All art begins as a struggle
against chaos.”
André Malraux, ibid.
“The army is a copy of
society and suffers from all
its diseases, usually at a
higher temperature.”
Leon Trotsky, quoted
in The Economist“In order to achieve the
impossible, one must
attempt the absurd.”
Miguel de Cervantes,
quoted on The Browser“If there’s not something
wrong with you, there’s
something wrong with you.”
Lionel Shriver in
The Spectator
“Oh God, I’m only 20 and
I’ll have to go on living and
living and living.”
Jean Rhys, quoted in
The Times“Growing up is losing
some illusions, in order to
acquire others.”
Virginia Woolf, quoted
on Goodreads“Part of me suspects that
I’m a loser, and the other
part of me thinks I’m
God almighty.”
John Lennon, quoted in
American Songwriter
“Judge a man by his
questions not his answers.”
Voltaire, quoted in ForbesAcross the world, people are
once again taking holidays,
working in offices and eating
out in restaurants, said Helen
Davidson in The Guardian.
“Faced with the seemingly
unstoppable Omicron variant”,
they’ve resolved to live as
normally as they can with
Covid-19. But in China, it is
a different story. Beijing’s
“zero-Covid” policy means that
a single case will trigger the
imposition of restrictions, and
with Omicron now cropping
up in multiple provinces, it is
estimated that 340 million
people are back in full or
partial lockdown. In Shanghai,
residents of areas deemed high risk have been
literally fenced into their homes, said Mike Liu in
The Times. And with compulsory testing in force,
people live in fear of an official in a hazmat suit
(a “Big White”) knocking on their door and
sending them to an over-crowded quarantine
centre. The sick are going untreated, because
many hospitals are closed; and all over Shanghai
people are going hungry, because shops are only
offering deliveries, and there are too few drivers
to serve the 26 million people stuck at home.
With fears that Beijing could be the next city to
fall into crippling lockdown, persisting with the
zero-Covid approach looks like insanity, said
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph.
But President Xi Jinping is trapped in a cul de
sac. For two years, state-run
media has hailed China’s
low Covid death rate as a
vindication of his leadership.
Xi can’t afford to admit now
that his zero-Covid policy was
a mistake; and nor can he
change course, said Gideon
Rachman in the FT. Lulled by
its early success in containing
Covid, China has been lax
about vaccines: a large
minority of over-60s have not
been fully jabbed, and China’s
vaccines are not thought to
offer as much protection as
foreign ones. Officials fear that
if Omicron is allowed to let rip
now, millions could die.Xi will not risk revising his policy until after the
Party Congress this autumn, where he hopes to
extend his grip on power, said Eyck Freymann in
The Wall Street Journal. And even then, he might
not wind it back, in spite of the damage it must
be doing to China’s economy: the 45 cities under
lockdown last week represented 40% of the
country’s GDP. It may be that in future, the Party
derives legitimacy less from GDP growth than
from protecting its citizens. If so, that will have
ramifications well beyond China’s borders, said
Mattie Brignall on Reaction. Already, reduced
consumer demand in China and congestion at
its ports are threatening to derail the global
economic recovery. If the disruption continues,
we could all be looking at a very different future.China: the zero-Covid policy backfires
It’s only two miles from the scene
of his greatest triumphs, but Boris
Becker’s new home is a far cry
from Wimbledon Centre Court,
said David Brown in The Times.
Sentenced last week to two-and-a-
half years, he is now residing in
HMP Wandsworth, a crumbling,
vermin-infested Victorian jail.
Becker had been convicted of four
charges under the Insolvency Act:
before declaring bankruptcy in
2017, he had concealed millions
of pounds of assets to avoid paying
his debtors. How did it happen?
“How did it all go wrong for the
former golden boy of tennis”, who
became the youngest ever Wimbledon champion,
aged just 17? How did someone who earned
some £40m during his career as a player, coach
and commentator end up drowning in debt?
What the judge described as Becker’s “fall from
grace” began on the evening of his final defeat at
Wimbledon in 1999, said Tim Adams in The
Observer. After losing to Pat Rafter in the fourth
round, he drank too much and found himself in
the broom cupboard of Nobu restaurant with
the Russian-Algerian model Angela Ermakova.
The resultant paternity suit, and a divorce from
his first wife, Barbara, which cost
him a reported £12m, “began the
emptying of Becker’s finances”.
After retiring from tennis, Becker
invested in a “dizzying number”
of projects, said Richard Kay in
the Daily Mail: a tennis academy
in China, footwear in India,
mobile phones in Slovenia,
a winery in Chile. But he was
“hammered by poor judgement”:
he is said to have lost a fortune
after investing £8m in the
Nigerian oil and gas industry;
he rented a huge house in
Wimbledon for ten years, at a cost
of £22,000 per month. “Money
troubles followed him everywhere.”As Becker’s many friends point out, he has never
liked to play by the rules, said Jim White in The
Daily Telegraph. In 2002, he was convicted of
evading taxes in Germany, by pretending he
was living in Monaco. His marriage to his
second wife Lilly also collapsed in 2018 amid
accusations of infidelity. Becker seems to have
thought he could bluff his way through any-
thing: he even tried to make it as a professional
poker player. Now Becker’s money is all gone,
and “finally his bluff has been called”.Statistics of the week
Storing Covid-related PPE is
estimated to be costing half
a million pounds a day.
The Daily TelegraphOnly 5.8% of all offences
reported to the police in
England and Wales last year
resulted in a charge, down
from 15.5% in 2014-15.
The GuardianWit &
Wisdom
Hammered by poor judgementShanghai’s “Big Whites” in action