The return of sport in 2021: the incredible highs and absolute lows

Sean Russell feels that in 2021, sport saved his mental health, but it wasn’t long until he was left with a nasty aftertaste, realising that there still remain the same old horrible problems as before the pandemic

Joy and inspiration: (clockwise from top left) Lewis Hamilton, Lizzie Deignan, the England football team, Emma Raducanu, and Tom Daley and Matty Lee (Getty/The Independent)

In March 2020, when images of piled-up coffins in northern Italy started appearing on the news, and videos trickled through of people singing from their balconies, the last thing on my mind was sport.

How could anyone consider the temporary pausing of sporting events as the most important thing in a time when people were dying, and we still had no idea what we were dealing with? Those early weeks and months were frightening and deeply uncertain, and the Tour de France, Olympics and Euros were not what most of us were thinking about. Sport seemed, then, unimportant.

But as the old adage goes, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. For the next few months, I, like everyone else, stayed at home. At work I read the Covid headlines, I even wrote a few, I could not pull myself out of the news cycle. Netflix was boring, reading could only do so much, as could speaking with friends online, but nothing carried me away from this pandemic world so completely until the Tour de France in August 2020.