In sport is it player or business interests which really matter?

The boundary between competition and entertainment has long been disputed but in the last week it has become less certain than ever.

In York Mark Allen, the eventual runner-up at the UK Snooker Championships, was banded a “silly little boy” by the sport’s supremo Barry Hearn after he dared to criticise Hearn’s commercialisation of the sport.

Allen was upset by the reduction in length of matches, which has aimed to please armchair and audience fans, but to the detriment of the players who prefer the intensity of a longer match.

Then in Auckland triple Olympic champion Ben Ainslie was disqualified from the World Sailing Champs after an argument with an obtrusive TV vessel.

Closing in on an unprecedented sixth Finn World title, Ainslie jumped from his boat and swam across supposedly shark infested waters in order to remonstrate with the crew, whose presence was producing progress impeding waves.

And this week was not alone. TV vehicles also caused problems in the Tour de France, where a French TV car crashed into a group of breakaway riders and catapulted one over a barbed wire fence, while in tennis a players strike is a possibility due to the ongoing competitor’s versus corporate tournament scheduling clash.

In comparison to these events, Sailing and Snooker both seem pretty small fry in terms of commercial, financial and spectator revenue.  

But sport is becoming big business across the board.  Once upon-a-time it was purely about the Olympian quest for physical perfection, yet in this era of professionalism business interests are as much if not more important.

Allen bemoans a perceived loss of purity in Snooker, but he will not be complaining when he receives greater prize-money, and greater sponsorship, opportunity and exposure as a result of Hearn’s actions.

And while it is easy to feel sympathy for Ainslie, and his two-race medal-ending ban did seem excessive, he knew that TV boats would be there and like his compatriots should have just accepted the situation.

Commercialism in sport can go too far. Match-fixing is an obvious example, as was the ECB’s infamous employment of fraudster Alan Stanford, along with pretty much any recent action of FIFA. This was epitomised by the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar and its 40’C+ temperature - a ludicrous case of player welfare being overlooked.

Players are by no means pawns in the game utterly to the whim of sporting super figures.

Yet they must also remember how much they owe to these figures, and while Ainslie’s actions may only add to his popular status they also cost him dear, and will only continue to do so.