Sinners

On Sunday there was a scandal . In the match of the bandy championship, which determined the breakdown of starting pairs in the playoffs, they met Arkhangelsk “Vodnik”, which, by coincidence of tournament fate, would have been more profitable to lose, and Irkutsk “Baikal”, practically devoid of tournament motivation. During the first half, the teams kicked the ball around the ice, not really trying to feign sporting enthusiasm. In the middle of the second, Vodnik player Oleg Pivovarov scored an own goal, and then, leaving the opponent in no doubt about his intentions, he scored two more own goals. “Baikal” took a timeout, the players conferred and, returning to the ice, began to play the same way: in the remaining minutes the teams scored 20 goals, the hosts were able to lose 9–11.

The scandal did not become a scandal in itself - the whole world agreed that the hockey players behaved disgustingly and should be punished, the disciplinary committee of the Bandy Federation announced a replay on a neutral field, the head coach of the national team said that the Breweries player was crazy, the Ministry of Sports is looking for the leadership of Vodnik ", disappeared somewhere out of fear. If you type the words “shame of Russian hockey” into a Google search, the first link will be the match in Arkhangelsk, and not, say, the eight goals Putin scored in an amateur hockey league match. In general, unfortunate hockey players are blamed for all mortal sins. And that's wrong. Not only have they done nothing wrong, but trying to punish them will do more harm than good to bandy.

Both theses, however, require clarification.

Sports wrestling and competitive spirit

Bandy is a difficult game. The games take place in the north and east, as a rule, in the cold season, the temperature at the matches drops to minus forty. Players are forced to fly to away matches halfway across the country and hardly in business class; To understand how much a Brewers player makes, you just have to try to remember the last time you saw a photo of him (let alone in person). The few spectators, who are also forced to sit throughout the match, warm up as best they can. This social reality: flights from Arkhangelsk to Irkutsk and Ulyanovsk to Kemerovo, high boots and vodka poured into thermoses is reflected even in the written rules of bandy. One of them states that “the referee has the right not to allow a player to participate in a match if, in the opinion of the referee, the player’s condition is such that he should not participate in the match” (is it worth revealing the meaning of this euphemism). Another is: “If an unauthorized person not connected with the game attempts to prevent the ball from crossing the goal line and fails to do so, the referee may award a goal if he is satisfied that the unauthorized conduct of the person concerned did not influence the situation.” " Even the appearance of warmed-up fans on the field does not lead to a stoppage of the game.

Despite all the obstacles, flights, frosts and drunken fans, hockey players honestly play matches from beginning to end and support the very sporting struggle that, along with “compliance with standards of conduct, morals and ethics,” is their responsibility under the regulations. Sports wrestling is, of course, not about pretending to be on your last legs and snatching victory with your teeth in every match, but about winning the championship. And if this requires using strategic considerations, and not just sticks, the more interesting the game.

It surprises no one that in real, popular hockey there is a whole recognized role generated by the need to regularly beat opponents on the ice. It would be hypocritical to believe that slamming your opponent against the side is a sporting fight, but using your brains and strategically losing is its absence. In this position there is an overt objectification of athletes. Hitting 11 goals into your own goal is an act that requires incomparably more courage than beating a person. But there is another, much more important consideration: the design of sports competitions inevitably involves situations where it is to the benefit of the team not to overdo it in a particular match. This happens even in popular and elaborate competitions such as the World Cup. In 1982, at the World Cup in Spain, it turned out that if Germany plays with Austria 1:0 or 2:0, then both teams are guaranteed to advance to the play- off stage. The Germans expectedly scored in the 10th minute, and then 22 football players, including the famous Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, staged a performance for eighty minutes, which went down in history as the “Gijon disgrace” and “Anschluss”. FIFA then changed the rules so that the decisive group stage matches would start at the same time.

If teams are prohibited from losing in the last match of the season, this will only lead to the fact that they will slowly begin to shirk the sport in advance, and instead of one obviously uninteresting match, there will be half a dozen suspicious ones. “Vodnik” acted much more honestly than the players of the German national team, and did so, guided not by cowardice or self-interest, but by a real competitive spirit. Fans coming to the stadium in minus forty degrees Celsius want their team to win the championship, and not the mythical spirit of sportsmanship in an ordinary game of a not very successful season.

John Rawls plays hockey

The Vodnik incident is interesting not because, of course, anyone cares about bandy - there are almost no such people even in snowy Russia. It does, however, raise important questions about the relationship between written rules of behavior, that is, formal institutions, and the natural human desire for everything to be fair. Often these aspirations come into conflict with each other.

Here's a simple example. The legislator writes a law according to which a certain act is punishable by imprisonment. The judge reads the law and applies it to a specific case - sentencing the suspect to prison. Sometimes - this happens - a convicted person turns out to be innocent. Can we repeal the law on this basis? Is it possible to justify the existence of a norm that, although rarely, makes innocent people suffer? We are all, of course, completely accustomed to such norms - they are our legislation - because we are guided by utilitarian considerations. In general, society can count on prosperity, and citizens can count on peace and justice, only when certain actions are outlawed. We can accept that sometimes good rules lead to unfair results, because the very existence of rules—respected and unchangeable—is a great good. But this logic also has a downside, which is completely obvious. If the constancy of rules is a public good, and it cannot be abandoned even when an innocent person suffers, then even more so we cannot break them in order to prevent the guilty from escaping retribution.

The legislator who creates institutions, wrote the philosopher John Rawls, looks to the future - that is, he thinks about a just social order. The judge passing the sentence is turned to the past, he is only interested in the circumstances of the case. This division of roles is not instrumental; Once it is abandoned, all our institutions will hang in the air. If rules are changed on the fly for retributive purposes (punishing the guilty at any cost), then the very idea of ​​the rule and all the public good it produces turns to dust. The only justification for the existence of rules—as opposed to moral intuition—is that they are constant, predictable, and well known by those whose behavior they are supposed to regulate. In this sense, the formula favored by prosecutors about ignorance of the law, which does not exempt from responsibility, is not flawless: a good law should be understandable and known to a second grader.

It is characteristic that the rules of bandy do not contain an article related to the Arkhangelsk incident. The teams did not violate a single letter of the written rules of the competition, which are so artless that they do not even clearly distinguish between goals scored in their own and others’ goals (a grammatically savvy Martian who read the rules of bandy would have awarded victory in the recent match to “Vodnik” - the hosts scored two goals more). To order a replay, the disciplinary committee had to take advantage of a clause in the rules that allows it to be done completely voluntarily, in case of unforeseen circumstances. The emergency powers exercised by the Federation perform the same function as deliberate violation of the law: they sacrifice the constancy of the rules of the game for the sake of a one-time restoration of justice. Before us in one person is a judge looking to the future and a legislator looking to the past. Minister of Sports Kolobkov (it turns out there is such a person) said after the match that “everyone who participated in this circus must suffer a well-deserved punishment so that this does not happen again.” To prevent this from happening again, we must learn to write rules, and not break them.

The story of the unusual match went viral on the Internet with comments in the spirit of “everything you need to know about Russian sports.” It is difficult to disagree with commentators: there will be no sport in a country in which athletes cannot desire to win competitions, legislators cannot clearly formulate the rules, and judges cannot apply them impartially. What makes sport better than anything else is that it has rules and no justice.