/pt/ – Petrarchan

The annual Isle of Man TT motorcycle races are being held this week. This is not the World Championship of motorcycling. The MotoGP series, which has dozens of races each year, features faster bikes, more skilful riders, bigger prize pots, and a far larger global viewership. But if you are familiar with the Isle of Man TT, you will know why this 118-year-old event is nonetheless considered by many fans to be the pinnacle of global motorcycle racing, and indeed of all motorsport. The main reason is because it can kill you. Unlike Grand Prix motorbike racing, the TT is not held on a purpose-built circuit but on closed roads. And this isn't a 'road course' like the Monaco Grand Prix, with its buildings and street furniture nestled safely behind barriers. Instead, to record a lap the riders must complete a nearly forty mile circumnavigation of Snaefell, the highest mountain on the island, passing through villages, over high and windy dales, and through farmland. The record average speed over a lap is 136mph (219kmph); competitors spend much of the race above 200mph, often only inches from stone walls and hedgerows. Little wonder then that most years someone dies at the TT. But some years are worse than others. In the 2022 edition, six racers were killed in crashes. Two of them, Roger and Bradley Stockton, were a father and son team, competing together in the sidecar class. Other sports used to be like this. Mainstream motorsport is now quite safe, but this is a relatively recent development. Before Formula 1 designers perfected the carbon-fibre safety cell in the mid 1980s, there were fatalities in most seasons. The preceding decades were even bleaker: as a top-flight professional racing driver in the 50s and 60s, your job was more likely to kill you than not. These were different times; two World Wars lay well within living memory. Regular people were hard-nosed about death to an extent that would seem misanthropic to us. Only when the generation born after the war came of age, with no ability to parse the violent deaths of young men as being anything other than senseless and tragic, did the mainstream forms of racing have to adapt. And adapt they did. Only strange, fringe events remained deadly, either unwilling or unable to change. Chief among them was the Isle of Man TT. There are other dangerous sports. High-altitude mountaineers die with a similar regularity to racing drivers of yore. Ill-prepared adventure tourists die on tall mountains and are scorned for it, but so do world renowned veterans. Sometimes skill will not save you. To summit K2 you must pass 'the Bottleneck', a horisontal traverse beneath overhanging ice that will kill you with total indifference to ability or fame. The world's most dangerous sport, though, might be proximity wingsuit flying. This is the high-octane lark of rocketing down a mountainside in one of those nylon suits that make you look like a flying squirrel, keeping as close to the terrain as your nerves allow. Unsurprisingly this is a sport that kills most of its practitioners. Experienced and talented pilots are more, not less, likely to die. There are many criticisms of dangerous sports. Some are pragmatic and rationalist in their bearing. For example, one line of argument points out the externalities on emergency and healthcare resources, and the unreasonable burden of making a stranger scrape your remains off the building(s) you managed to paint yourself across. Another ethical critique considers the impact of your death on your friends and family. Isn't it selfish to risk life and limb when you know full well how much your death would hurt other people? This argument carries more weight when you see men with young families mount motorcycles or shoulder expedition backpacks. What thrills or fame could be worth the cost of potentially leaving your child an orphan? Finally, some people take a principled moral stance against sports with such a high degree of danger. If suicide is wrong, then doing something which occasions suicide for no better reason than hedonism must itself be wrong. In the eyes of some, to wager your own life so cheaply is a sin from first principles, before even considering the effect it has on others. These arguments will persist. I cannot imagine, though, that dangerous sports will ever go away. It may take some new cataclysm and mass hardening of hearts for them to return to the mainstream. But on the fringes, people will always find new ways to dip their toes in the inky pools of oblivion.