WE ARE now in the sixth week of our third Covid lockdown.

All schools, colleges, and universities are closed. We are not to leave our home, except for work, medical attention, or an emergency.

All gyms, pools, and recreation facilities are closed. We want to exercise, then once a day and locally, and on our own.

And we are not to travel far from our homes. If we do we can be arrested and fined.

Huge exhausting pressure on our whole country, not least our NHS and millions more keeping the country running.

But there is one enormous group exempt from our national regulations. All those who “play” for a living. The professional elitist sports brigades.

It is to me beyond stunning. Earning typically £100,000 a year upwards into the stratosphere, professional footballers, rugby players, tennis players, and all the other elitist sports, continue as if Covid is happening in another world.

All grassroots sport on local recs, for children, youths, and adults, is all closed down. But elitist sport continues exempt from all the major strictures: stay home; don’t travel; keep social distance at all times.

As if rugby players don’t grab and hold each other, footballers are not barging into one another. And the same in all sports, close contact unavoidable, including in dressing rooms.

It really is a cosmic joke. In Melbourne now with the Open tennis tournament, many in Victoria bitterly opposing 3,000 tennis players and entourage flying into Victoria, the state has ended in lockdown. The premier Daniel Andrews speaking of the “UK virus spreading at the speed of light”.

It is then very baffling why governments are happy for elite sports people to fly around the world, with risk of carrying virus, whilst the rest of us are in severe lockdown. Truth is sport was once about doing sport, and keeping fit. Now it is of course a massive multi trillion pound entertainment industry. And as we see, in the direst of circumstances, an elitist law unto themselves.

JEFF WILLIAMS

Jubilee Road, Parkstone