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European soccer's fight against racism not yet won
JOHN LEICESTER
(The Associated Press)

06:50:53AM (ET) Thursday,January 19,2012.

PARIS (AP) — For fans of soccer, Feb. 1 promises to be a sad day.

John Terry, one of the most rugged, fearsome and admired defenders anywhere in the world, a natural leader who captains his club, Chelsea, and his country, England, will appear at a London courthouse to face a criminal charge that he abused a black colleague with a torrent of vile, racially insulting language.

Terry insists the whole affair is a misunderstanding. Born and raised in the ethnic melting pot of east London, he has played with or alongside black players all of his sporting life. Yet video from an Oct. 23 Premier League match appeared to show him shouting, "You ------- black ----" at Queens Park Rangers defender Anton Ferdinand, whose brother, Rio, has long been Terry's partner in the England defense.

Terry was quick to issue a statement: "People have leapt to the wrong conclusions about the context of what I was seen to be saying." He vowed to "fight tooth and nail to prove my innocence" at the West London Magistrates' Court.

Still, this and other incidents in England and elsewhere in Europe are raising questions about whether efforts to stamp out racist behavior in the world's No. 1 sport have taken a big step backward after having made so many strides forward in the past decade or more. Have racist fans and players simply been lurking, unrepentant, under the surface, instead of being hounded out? Have soccer authorities, led by world governing body FIFA and its European cousin, UEFA, eased up too early in their often-stated determination to rid the global sport of all forms of discrimination?

"We were winning," said Steve Rotheram, a British lawmaker who successfully lobbied for a parliamentary committee to take a new look at racism in sports, following the Terry case and others. However, "people have started to ask about institutional racism and, you know, whether or not the sort of improvements that we'd all hoped have happened over the past 20 years are actually embedded."

The inquiry will start gathering evidence in March. "We've got to be ever vigilant, to make certain that racism doesn't make a comeback," Rotheram said in a phone interview.
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This story continues in length and in depth.
Racism should not have a place in sports yet it is used as a ego booster in places of work such as maintaining high esteem.
Should it be ?
Do we have a long journey ahead ?

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