The Sun Newspaper are about to be embroiled in a legal battle with former Olympic sprinter, Linford Christie, following the paper’s article about Christie fathering kids from a different relationship to the mother of his first children.
It was barely a week after this blog ran a piece in which the well accomplished former Olympian has lent his support to a Masters Athletics championships in Lee valley hosted by befit today health club, that an article headlining the front page of the Sun Newspaper took everyone by surprise.
Christie at the time was featuring in a reality television show-the Jump- unaware he was headlining one of the country’s most proliferated newspapers in a not so complementary piece diametrically opposed the sentiments we had conveyed in our article the previous week. When we called his sports organization, ’nuff respect’, his representative was quick to tell us the case was in the hands of their lawyers and very assertively warned of the dangers of implicitly affirming the content’s of the Sun’s story to be true, even by way of repeating any statements of facts contained in the story.
The Sun of Sunday repeated their story in greater detail last Sunday with verbatim quotations from the mother of Linford’s children who expressed a personal grievance that her kids could not publicly identify with their father.
”Nothing has changed”, his representative told me with respect the legal challenge to be mounted against the Sun for running that story.
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DEFAMATION
Christie has hired a £400 an hour law firm for what is presumably a case of defamation- a legal term that describes culpability for harm that results to an injured party as a result of a false statement published that lowers the esteem of the one written about in the eyes of reasonable people. A successful defense requires a demonstration to the courts that the contested statement(s) was true and would not have lowered the esteem of the complainant in the eyes of reasonable people.
ROLE MODEL
The initial article by The Sun on Sunday concluded the revelations by the mother of Winford’s kids to be damning to his image as a role model, though this statement will not constitute any point of legal relevance outside of the central issue of ‘truth’ that must necessarily underpin any legal challenge involving defamation.
Whilst it will be very interesting to see if any legal challenge comes off the ground on this very hot and delicate article, it is pertinent to address the extent to which an accomplished sports person can reasonably be said to have forfeited any role model status they once had prior to a negative revelation that ostensibly compromises their good standing.
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First, the accomplishments of a sportsman can never go to waste and as such it is the drive, fervency and dedication, as well as talent, youths should try to emulate when they look at the life of a high achieving sportsman. Any failings or shortcoming that later comes to light can at best tarnish their role model status, but not eradicate it completely. In saying this, not all sportsmen like footballers, athletes, etc should be considered role models. Only the who have achieved outstanding and notable achievements in their respective careers.
That said, belonging to a promising career can itself be deemed as worthy of being considered a role model, but it is logically intuitive that the ambit for such admirable and highly coveted status should be much narrower than generally perceived. We as humans are not infallible, though when any acts considered deplorable and reprehensible are noted in our stars, society must also collectively take the rap if those frailties are observable in our society too. After all, stars in every sphere emerge from society.
INFIDELITY
The issue of infidelity is one that should be shunned in any responsible society. It creates all sorts of complex problems, and where children are involved, it could have far reaching effects on them. The background to cheating on a partner can be complex with many twists and turns accounting for the reasons thereof. There is no suggesting here that we are taking any position on the truth or otherwise of the story printed tow Sunday’s running in The Sun, except to say that when ever known stars fall foul of the moral codes of conduct we conventionally agree to be ideal, it may tarnish their reputation but does not throw away their achievements.
Rather they accentuate the need for society to examine its morals more intently and together strive to root out the ills that detract from the greatest heights of being that we can be.
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