Sport and fashion have long gone hand in hand, though if you've watched orienteering on telly you'll know they don't always stay on speaking terms. Still, from tennis to boxing and rugby to rowing, the style-watchers and brand gurus have long been willing to poach ideas and looks from the jocks.
The traffic isn't all one way, either. I can remember the miserable hours I spent during the 1976 Montreal Olympics trying to figure out how I could get my hands on a bell-bottomed Adidas tracksuits. And who can forget the faux denim calamity the American snowboarders wore at the 2010 Winter Olympics?
This week, fashion and sport came together again, at least in my head. The cause was the dismay felt in British bridge circles when the uber-complex card game so beloved of Omar Sharif was turned down in its bid to be classed as a sport by Sport England.
The whys and wherefores are unimportant – it's all to do with access to government grants and lottery funds – but what does matter is how the decision was made and on what grounds. As I write this, a high court judge in London is mulling over the case as the English Bridge Union seeks to have the ruling overturned.
The beak is called Mr Justice Dove and, while I'm not party to his deliberations, I'm pretty certain he's going to ignore the most important legal precept here, namely Didcock's Law. More fool him if he does.
The legalese is too complicated and nuanced for most readers of The Herald so I'll put it in layman's terms: Didcock's Law states that a sport can only be considered a sport if it has something in its sartorial DNA that fashion can pinch. By this yardstick, angling is a sport because fishing hats have had their occasional moments in the sun and I dare say thigh-high rubber waders will one day too. On the other hand, football isn't a sport because nobody wearing a baggy Partick Thistle top ever ended up in a style blog. Not even Chic Charnley.
Apply all this to bridge and I'm afraid to say you have to side with Sport England, whatever Mr Justice Dove ends up deciding. Case in point: the motley crew of bridge players who were persuaded to perform on Newsnight on Tuesday. The nattiest dresser in the studio was presenter Evan Davis, and that's a rare thing. It's clear, then, that if bridge players want their parlour game to be taken seriously as a sport, they're going to have to come up with a uniform.
Taking a cue from Morris dancing (also a sport according to Didcock's Law. Sorry), I'd go for pristine whites, shirts with sleeves long enough to hide cards in, and stout shoes to be tapped impatiently if there's a hold-up choosing trumps. The whole lot would be accessorised with bells and ribbons and, to guarantee the crossover to fashion that is a requirement of Didcock's Law, I'd turn to Vivienne Westwood to design it all. I think that would trump any arguments Sport England could muster. Next stop: the Olympics.
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