Do Sports Need Heroes?

I'm not a man who is very fond of calendars. Perhaps because I don't live by the usual weekday-work, weekend-off format, I couldn't care less which part of the month we're in. But I can only tell whether it's the start or the middle of the month when a message saying "article" arrives from Atıl Atılgan. I'm not being brief out of laziness. Atıl simply says "article", and when I put it off, he decorates it with some charming adjectives. I prefer to keep what those adjectives are between us, in honour of our friendship of more than 25 years...

Once again, after the article reminder that started on Friday, I sat down at the keyboard. After sitting for a while, I got up again. My excuse was ready. There are broadcasts at the weekend, let me get through those first and then I'll write. Indeed, the conditions for doing just that were right: the day was suitable for writing, the ball was round (laugh and I'll shoot you). I thought I'd put together a piece about the World Rally Championship returning to our country following the announcement of the WRC calendar. Then I saw that everyone on social media was already writing about it. I thought I'd thank TOSFED, Serkan Yazıcı above all. But everyone had already recognised the value of the work Chairman Serkan has done and thanked him. I thought I'd churn out something along the lines of "support the event". They'd done that too. All that was left for me, I told myself, was to be there that weekend, pick up the microphone and present the Turkish round of the WRC. I can't sit still with excitement already...

Then I thought: what if I had done this job in the days when my heroes were competing? What if I had announced Colin McRae and Nicky Grist at the start ramp (I admit I first wrote Derek Ringer and then deleted it; somehow I think the Welsh Wizard suits being alongside the late Nicky better)? What if I had called out the names of Tommi Mäkinen and Risto Mannisenmäki? Or shouted out Carlos Sainz and Luis Moya as they took the start? I must admit that, besides the joy of watching those days, I feel just as much sorrow at not having been able to present them.

Then I thought of heroes in sport. Whether it's rallying, MotoGP, or basketball, football, handball, lacrosse, kabaddi or golf, do you follow a sport so closely because you love the sport itself, or because you have a hero? I genuinely wonder about that. In rallying, for example, my hero was Colin McRae. Even though he was World Rally Champion only once, watching him go, analysing his character and seeing him do the job was like a power stage within my love of the WRC. Just like Ronnie O'Sullivan in snooker.

In recent years, in the lobby of a hotel in İzmir, Volkan Işık, Koray Muratoğlu and I got into a friendly debate on this very subject. While I spoke about the importance of heroism over championships in a sport and said "McRae is greater than Loeb", Koray insisted that the opposite of my equation was true, saying "how can that be, just look at the number of Loeb's world titles."

So do you think it is a hero that keeps a sport alive? Or let me put the question this way.

Do sports need heroes?