Sport has long been bedevilled by four-letter words but currently it is two six-letter ones that are troubling the consciousness. Sleaze and racism.

I am glancing at front-and back-pages of the papers which are occupied by reports of the conviction of three Pakistani Test cricketers on charges of conspiring to cheat and accepting corrupt payments, and to the decision by police to probe allegations the England and Chelsea captain, John Terry, racially insulted QPR's Anton Ferdinand.

It doesn't make pleasant reading. Sadly not much in sport does, these days.

I wrote here only recently of how dishonesty becoming the name of the games people play and how hard it is to find a sport left untainted by incidents of extreme wrongdoing in one form or another from athletics to snooker.

Sadly, sleaze now seems to be an indelible part of the sporting lexicon but one would have hoped that by now racism would have been eradicated from it. Unfortunately this does not appear to be the case.  Whatever the outcome, we must hope that the respective findings of the Ferdinand – Terry case and the other ongoing inquiry into allegations that Manchester United's Patrice Evra was persistently racially abused by Luis Suarez of Liverpool will serve as a reminder for footballers, indeed all involved in sport, to focus their minds on just how unacceptable even the merest hint of racist attitudes is these days.  Indeed, as it should have been at any time in history but sadly wasn't.

Suarez was said to have used the 'n' word at least 10 times while Terry's bizarre defence is that he was asking a question of Ferdinand, rather than making a comment ("Did you say I called you a F...ing black c...?"). But it is when you hear that Chelsea fans have now taken up chanting abuse of Ferdinand that you really despair.


I first encountered the real abhorrence of racism in South Africa in the wretched days of Apartheid when interviewing a black cyclist who stood trembling in front of me. When I asked him to sit down, he refused, pointing out that to do so in the presence of a white man was against the law of the land.  Thankfully, sport was instrumental in kicking such discrimination into touch and the International Olympic Committee, albeit belatedly, played a major part when they banned both South Africa and the then Rhodesia from the Games until their respective unholy houses were in order.

Sport and show business are surely the most ethnically diverse components of our daily life yet elements of racism still seem to be prevalent in both. I have been reading an interview with one of my favourite entertainers, the British-based black American stand-up comic Reginald D. Hunter in which he says, "Britain has more of a class problem than a race problem, but racism still exists. I had a racist incident that happened to me less than a week ago."

Similarly I was talking this week with Nigel Walker, the former international hurdler and Welsh rugby star, who is now one of the country's shockingly few black sports administrators as director of the English Institute of Sport. We talked about the current racial issues and he confirmed that as a young rugby player he was often subjected to abuse and he believes that more of it than we actually realise still goes on and that to some degree it has been accepted and shrugged off.

As it happens, two of the sports with which I have been most closely associated – boxing and athletics – have been conspicuously free of racism between competitors for many years. It may not be a coincidence that these are sports in which black competitors are most proficient.

Indeed, the last racist incident I can recall in boxing happened back in the early eighties when Britain's Alan Minter scandalously remarked before defending his world middleweight championship to Marvin Hagler, "There is no way I will lose my title to a black man."  As it happened, he did, rather brutally so, early in a bout which saw a ringside riot at Wembley. Had such a thing happened now, I have no doubt Minter would rightly have been banned from boxing for life.

I suspect there are few sports personalities from ethnic minorities who have not been targeted in some form during their formative years. I know the former Olympic silver medallist and current World light welterweight champion Amir Khan has, not to his face of course but via the internet. Yet Khan's Britishness, like that of his Pakistan-born father who famously wore a Union Jack waistcoat during the Athens Olympics, is beyond question.


Tessa Sanderson, the Olympic javelin champion, and one of the great icons of British sport once told me "I had people spit on me at school and was called a gollywog and a nigger. When you are 15 or 16, that is hurtful, very hurtful. I had fights over it. Ok, that was then, but you know there are still a lot of people in Britain who are racist but you can't go round with a chip on your shoulder all the time because you will never move on. But people do get hurt. There's a lot of feeling among our young black athletes, when I see somebody get hurt, it hurts me too, especially in my community and my family. I am accepted now because I have gone out there and done things, proved my worth, flown the flag, but it's still about. Fortunately it doesn't confront me now, and anyway, I have grown up knowing how to handle it. For some young people today it can be touch and go."

Of course, it is not just the colour of one's skin that can be the cause of prejudice; there are many other forms. There is homophobia – and plenty of that exists in sport. Again this week we had an example when fans of Brighton and Hove Albion FC claimed that the club has been made a target because of the town's gay community. "There's a certain amount of banter between fans, but when it crosses that line, it's not acceptable," says John Hewitt, the chairman of the Albion supporters.

Then there is religion. Anyone who has ever attended an Old Firm derby will tell you just how strong that bitter divide remains – just ask Neil Lennon, the Celtic manager, who was physically attacked by a zealot last season.

I came across another disturbing example of discrimination when I interviewed the new British heavyweight boxing champion, Tyson Fury, a young man immensely proud of his Romany routes. I asked him whether he had ever experienced prejudice because of his heritage. "Oh yes," he says. "All the time.  I get called 'You gypsy bastard, fat gypo,' lots of things."  But like Amir Khan, never to his face. As he stands a tad short of six feet and nine inches, weighs 18 stone and is unbeaten in his 16 contests, you can understand why. "It's mainly the Facebook warriors," he said. "But at least I know that every time I win it hurts them more."

And how about sexism? How much longer can the International Olympic Committee tolerate the presence of a Saudi Arabian team from which women are purposely excluded? Here is a nation which not only prohibits women from playing sport in public but actually bars them from watching it.

Now,as a postscript, a personal confession. In my Independent on Sunday column last week, I jocularly used the word 'boyos' when praising the Welsh international, Gareth Bale and any compatriots who plan to defy the FA of Wales and wear a Team GB shirt in the London Olympics next year. Red dragons have been breathing fire all over me since (eg: "You are just an old-fashioned bigot") which rather amuses me as for many years I was greeted by a Welsh sports editor with the words "'Allo boyo, how are you today?"  As a Cockney, I can't see how that is any more pejorative than being called 'Mate' or 'Cobber' by an Australian.  But it just shows how careful you have to be in these PC days with the Twitterati's fingers constantly poised over the keyboard.

As Reginald D. Hunter also said, "Twitter is a little bit like democracy. It encourages stupid people to have an opinion."

I am not sure I totally agree with that, but one thing I am certain of; while there is a lot of pride in sport these days, there is still an awful  lot of prejudice.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Olympics, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire