Eddie Kidd and Ai Weiwei versus Sepp Blatter and Sally Bercow: we reflect on the highs and lows of a chaotic 12 months.
Hero: former motorcycle stunt rider Eddie Kidd (with his wife Sam) took 43 days to finish the London Marathon, raising £75.000 for charity Photo: JANE MINGAY
By William Langley
7:00AM GMT 01 Jan 2012
7 Comments
THE GOOD
Merely surviving in a world so beset by problems might be considered heroism in itself. As economies flounder, wars and terrorism gnaw at our security, and the planet itself shudders from the abuses heaped upon it, millions gamely carry on – doing their best for their families, businesses and communities, maintaining their optimism and sense of purpose.
Yet a handful of men, women and, occasionally, children raise the bar with their bravery, talent or faith. If they have anything in common it is that very few of them expect praise, or even regard their acts as exceptional. In great and small ways everyone on The Sunday Telegraph’s annual Heroes of the Year list has done something to make our troubled world a slightly better place. And if enough of us could follow their example, we could actually be getting somewhere.
THE FUKUSHIMA 50
In Japanese disaster movies, a small band of heroes typically stands between scenes of blazing landscapes, flattened cities and fleeing populations. So it was, in real life, that a handful of workers volunteered to stay behind in the wreckage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant. The world came to know them as the Fukushima 50, and their celebrity was entirely unsought. Their job was to restore power lines, prevent fires and use sea water to cool the overheating reactor, shattered in an earthquake on March 11. No one doubted Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s assurance that they were “fully prepared for death”. Fortunately, as far as we know, all are still alive.
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The top 10 Britons of the year - 28 Dec 2011
JORDAN RICE
With an area bigger than France and Germany under water, the scale of January’s Australian floods challenged our ability to comprehend. It took the smaller, human experiences of loss, courage and kindness to bring the disaster into focus, and nothing did so as poignantly as the death of 13-year-old Jordan Rice, a freckle-faced schoolboy from the small town of Toowoomba, west of Brisbane.
Jordan, with his mother, Donna, and 10-year-old brother, Blake, were driving though the waterlogged town when their engine cut out. Mrs Rice was told to stay with the car and await rescue. Soon, though, the water was seeping through the doors and forcing the family onto the roof. A passer-by, tethered to a rope, grabbed Jordan by the shoulders. But the boy broke free, insisting that Blake should be saved first. Minutes later, Jordan and his mother were swallowed up by the flood.
“Long may their tale live to remind us,” read a tribute in the local newspaper, “of the uplifting goodness our species is capable of.”
MOHAMED BOUAZIZI
Like so many little people who trigger big events, Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old fruit and vegetable seller in the nondescript Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, wasn’t seeking to change the world. All he wanted was a truck. So he worked hard and saved, but his reward was a police summons for trading without a permit. Obtaining a permit would mean paying a bribe – and the bribe would go towards sustaining the very system that kept men like him poor and voiceless. When he protested at the municipal offices, he was ignored. So he decided to set himself on fire.
In doing so he ignited a wave of protest that became known as the Arab Spring. The assumption of autocratic rule – from Sidi Bouzid through Tripoli to Damascus and beyond – began to totter. Within 10 days of Mohamed’s death on January 4, Tunisia’s president Ben Ali had fled the country after 23 years in power, and a week later protesters gathered in Cairo’s Tahir Square. Bouazizi’s place in history was secure.
GABRIELLE GIFFORDS
US Congresswoman ''Gabby’’ Giffords, 41, was holding a meeting in Tuscon, Arizona, on January 8 when a gunman opened fire. Six people died, and Mrs Giffords was shot in the head at point-blank range. She was taken to hospital in a critical condition, having lost the power of movement and speech. Since then her battle to recover and return to politics has held Americans rapt. In the summer she was wheeled into Congress for a crucial vote on the deficit deal, and she has since expressed her determination to carry on with her life. She now walks with a limp and can form simple sentences.
Asked what her plans were, she replied, “Get. Better. Soon.”
ANN TIMSON
The raid on a Northampton jewellers had been carefully planned: the window would be smashed and the loot carried off on scooters. But the robbers had not bargained for the arrival on the scene of 71-year-old ''Supergran’’ Ann Timson. Mrs Timson thought at first a fight had broken out. By the time she realised what was happening, a fight had broken out – and Mrs Timson was winning it. “I started whacking them over the head with my shopping bag,” she said. “I told them: 'We don’t want this sort of thing in Northampton’.” The gang fled in disarray, but all were later arrested and jailed.
AI WEIWEI
A few years ago, the bearded Beijing artist was cruising confidently through the notoriously choppy Chinese cultural waters – even helping to design the striking ''Bird’s Nest’’ Olympic stadium.
Then Weiwei stepped out of line, criticising the ruling Communist Party and its human rights record. In June he was detained on unspecified charges and later hit with a £1.5 million tax bill which he says he can’t pay, and wouldn’t even if he could. Weiwei has since become a symbol of the resistance to China’s authoritarian regime.
CAPTAIN LISA HEAD
Three weeks after arriving in Afghanistan, 29-year-old Capt Head became the first British female bomb disposal officer to be killed on duty. Her unit of the Royal Logistic Corps was operating in the notorious Helmand province. On April 18, the Huddersfield University graduate was working to clear a booby-trapped alleyway. A first device was successfully defused, and Capt Head was working on another when it went off. Critically injured, she was flown home but died the following day. Her colleague on the mission, Capt Mike Kennedy, called her: “The bravest woman I have ever met.”
HEGE DALEN AND TORIL HANSEN
When Anders Behring Breivik opened fire on a youth camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya, Hege Dalen and Toril Hansen were picnicking on the lake’s shore. Hearing the gunfire and screams, they set out in a small boat and, with gun rounds landing in the water around them, were able to rescue more than a dozen youngsters.
“The hardest thing was seeing the dead bodies,” Ms Dalen later said.
EDDIE KIDD
The former motorcycle stunt rider, who was partly paralysed and brain damaged after a crash 15 years ago, finished this year’s London Marathon in last place. It took him 43 days, at an average speed of .025 mph. Yet Eddie, 51, raised £75,000 for children’s charities. To complete the course, he needed a walking frame and a hi-tech sensor to stimulate movement in his legs. A one-time glamour boy whose feats included jumping the Great Wall of China, Eddie is now largely dependent on the help of friends and his wife, Samantha, who completed the course with him.
ALAN 'BIG MAN’ POLLOCK
There comes a time in every train traveller’s life when you’ve just had enough, be it lack of seats, gibberish announcements, draughty carriages, or the awkward passenger with no ticket who refuses to get off.
On a dreary December night on a train from Edinburgh to Perth, burly investment manager Alan Pollock’s time came. The ''Big Man’’, as the world now knows him thanks to a YouTube video of the episode, decided he had heard enough of student Sam Main’s foul-mouthed remonstrations with an elderly ticket inspector.
“Is there a problem?” he asked politely. And with that, he picked up Sam and threw him onto the platform.
The thing about true heroism is that you can find it anywhere. But why so rarely?
THE BAD
This year promised to be an uncomfortable one for villainy, with the long-awaited death of Lord Voldemort, the archest baddie of our times, in the final Harry Potter film. “Greatness inspires envy,” declared the unmentionable one. “Envy engenders spite. Spite spawns lies.”
There was both a truth and a timeliness in this, as lies, envy and spite went on to figure prominently in the year that unfolded. Along, naturally, with the familiar vices of depravity, megalomania and corruption. We saw dictators fall, businesses fail, sportsmen flop – but sometimes struggled to decide whether to boo or cheer.
One of the oddities of a world where so many things are going wrong is the difficulty of identifying culprits. Is the euro crisis the fault of the bankers, the politicians or the tax-avoiding Greeks? Is the Chipping Norton Set the new Islington Mafia? Who is turning the Arab Spring into the Arab Winter? And what were the riots all about?
THE RIOTERS
The causes of this summer’s riots were energetically debated, but the truth wasn’t hard to see. The riots were caused by the rioters. David Cameron talked of “feral wickedness”, and Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, claimed that “a sense of entitlement” had infected the urban underclass. Others weren’t so sure. The Archbishop of Canterbury and Harriet Harman appeared convinced that the mobs were engaged in some ham-fisted rebalancing of the moral universe, while The Guardian was uncomfortable even using the term “rioters”. What, then, can we politely call all those people seen running through the streets with TV sets and armfuls of trainers? Store inventory reduction specialists?
ADAM WERRITY
Wearing matching morning suits and slippery grins, the then Defence Secretary Liam Fox and his inseparable friend, Adam Werritty, looked like the Laurel and Hardy of Westminster. The humour began to wear off when it emerged that Mr Werritty had been travelling the world on Mr Fox’s coat-tails, handing out business cards claiming to be the minister’s special adviser. He wasn’t. But who was he? Some viewed the podgy Scotsman as a Walter Mitty character, others as a canny peddler of influence. At least in getting poor Mr Fox sacked from the Cabinet, he achieved something of consequence.
SALLY BERCOW
Such shreds of dignity as are left to the Mother of Parliaments have been vanishing apace since Long Tall Sally, borne along by her diminutive husband John Bercow, the House of Commons Speaker, arrived on the scene.
Sally began the year by posing starkers, but for a bedsheet, in the window of the couple’s grace-and-favour Westminster apartment; went on to appear on Celebrity Big Brother, where she discussed her “spicy” sex life; and finished by telling a political magazine that her favourite labour-saving device was a vibrator. Described by one Parliamentary chronicler as “a loose-knickered trollop”, the Valkyrie-esque Sally now hopes to become a Labour MP.
THE ENGLAND RUGBY TEAM
Drunk... clueless... a reputation left in the mud. And that was just the captain. Sent forth on the fondest of hopes, England’s dwarf-throwing, bonus-bagging, boat-jumping Rugby World Cup squad succeeded only in making themselves the tournament’s most unpopular team. “All the other nations have one thing in common,” sniffed the French coach Marc Lievremont. “We don’t like the English.”
This assessment might not have mattered if the team had delivered anything on the field. Instead, coach Martin Johnson had to resign, and the post-fiasco inquest revealed that the players had no idea what was going on. Even when they were sober.
THE PAKISTANI CRICKETERS
At Lords, of all places, the soul of cricket was tainted by greed and malice. So long synonymous with notions of fair play, the game was forced to face up to its vulnerability. In this sense, the corrupt players – and the Asian betting ring that operated them – may have done the game a favour. Three Pakistanis were jailed, but they took down with them the lingering conceit that cricket was somehow above such unpleasantness. Worth remembering, too, is that the flawless investigative work that exposed them was done by the now defunct News of the World.
SILVIO BERLUSCONI
Over a month has passed since Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was thrown out of office by the Germans. Admittedly, the Colosseum has not fallen down, the Tiber has not run dry and no plagues or spaghetti famines have driven millions from their homes in the thyme-scented hillsides. Yet a terrible malaise afflicts the country. In Silvio’s absence, things are being run by Mario Monti, a technocrat with the personality of bread mould, and the Italians, for whom boredom is a particular affliction, are beginning to fret. The good news is that Silvio, 74, is already talking about a comeback, and court charges of fraud, bribery and paying an underage girl for sex shouldn’t hold him up for too long.
DOMINIQUE STRAUSS-KAHN
“My flesh is weak,” admitted the disgraced former head of the IMF, although the toughness of his hide made up for it. For years before his arrest in New York on sexual assault charges, DSK was known as a man who didn’t take no for an answer. Afterwards it became clear that he didn’t take “I’m calling the police” for an answer, either. The French establishment’s mostly faux outrage at DSK’s treatment by America gave way in turn to a recognition that such conduct was all too characteristic of powerful men in a society that let them get away with it. All that has changed. Can DSK?
COLONEL GADDAFI
The strange life and death of Muammar Gaddafi threw up a host of questions, including how a man with so many medals only reached the rank of colonel. He was, in many ways, a simple creature, happiest in his tent among his own desert people. Yet nobody stays at the top for four decades without understanding the pathologies of power, and the Colonel shrewdly compounded his knowledge with a talent for tyranny and a pantomime villain’s gift for appearing essentially harmless. As the uprising engulfed him, he denounced the rebels as “rats”. At the end, though, it was Gaddafi himself who went to ground in a sewer pipe.
SEPP BLATTER
The voting was tight, the competition tough, but it was no surprise when Sepp Blatter, gaffe-prone head of football’s governing body Fifa, beat the likes of scheming Simon Cowell and Premier League bonehead Ashley Cole in a poll to find the past decade’s No 1 villain. And that was before the 75-year-old former Swiss Tourist Board clerk suggested that players should settle complaints of racism with a handshake. The outcry forced him to apologise, but only up to a point. After assessing matters with his customary thoughtfulness, Sepp accused Britain of stirring up trouble for him because we didn’t land the 2018 World Cup.
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Showing 7 comments
Peter Koperasi
Yesterday 10:12 PM
Quick Poll: Will Silvio Berlusconi return to power in Italy?
http://graph.me/p259178711/q
sir_rantalot
Yesterday 02:25 PM
The Murdochs? Cameron & Coulson? "Merkozy"? George "We're all in this together" Osborne (See you in 2 weeks, I'm off skiing)?
Barryvanhire
Yesterday 02:14 PM
Thought all the people involved in the hacking scandal should have found their way onto the bad list.
satchafunkilus
Yesterday 12:06 PM
Can't agree with the selection of 'big man', heard the full story of this on Jeremy Vine and any one of us could have ended up in that ticket situation - the lad had a ticket, travels that train every day and had been doing exams all day even though unwell. Am quite sure 'big fat man' would have remained seated had it not been such a scrawny kid to bully.
xtremejon
Yesterday 10:37 AM
I think I could add a few more..
Heroes:- The disabled rowers who are now hoping for rescue in the mid Atlantic.
Hmmmm Others well not so many but Villains aplenty
Chris Huhne for being Chris Huhne
Cable for being an unsmiling embittered curmudgeon with a puffed up sense of self righteousness.
Clegg.. oh well...
The entire AGW conspiracy which, while totally ignoiring and even failing to try and answer the massive holes that have been pointed out in their theories, sail on regardless, taxing us to death and imagining that some ever so costly agreement is going to achieve anything.
Sarkozy for being a typical arrogant Frenchman who thinks only of his next election and the past glories of the French and trying to get Germany to pay for his, and every other ClubMed country's profligacy.
The entire Republican Party who have an election for the taking but just can't see to put up a credible candidate.
Jacob Zuma, who has now signed into law a bill which effectively kills press freedom so the corruption of the ANC can no longer be exposed.
Kirchner for whipping up Malvinas paranoia when they really have never had any legitimate claim to 1 sq cm of the Falklands.
Obama for just about every inept thing he keeps on doing including giving some vague support to Kirchner.
The TEA party. Agreement in the Taxed Enough Already stance but pure ineptness in how they are going about things.
And so on. I am sure many will add more.
james1
Yesterday 10:07 AM
The Bad....?
All the native British hacks of the media who continue to support the multicultural / multiracial destruction of their own country, putting their careeers before the future of their own children and grandchildren. Doesn't get much worse than that
liberation
Yesterday 09:53 AM
To be added to THE GOOD:-
The police and the armed service men and women, who perform incredibly difficult jobs who we are all immensely grateful for despite both being decimated by funding cuts.
To be added to THE BAD:-
The evil (cannot think of a more apt description) liberal twitterati, bloggers and reporter mob. Who demand that people’s careers and employment prospects are permanently destroyed by using public ostracisation and humiliation placing them and their families on the breadline, for even hinting at certain banned PC subjects like opposing overwhelming mass immigration? These modern fascists that delight in sending mothers to prison for expressing their feelings under duress being surrounded and a victim of a modern happy slap, or delight in young children being sent to court or forever recorded as racists in thought crime registers for mistakenly falling foul of PC thought laws.
The under-reported Congolese rioters, who attacked blind carol singers and tried to topple/burn down the Trafalgar square Christmas tree resulting in 143 arrests.
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