With the obvious exceptions of figure skating and tossing the caber most sports are pretty pointless. Some are virtual declarations of class war. Polo, show jumping and golf among others. Hugo Chávez, in a bit of off the cuff inspired populism, has decided to shut down two golf courses. His reasoning is admirable. “Let’s leave this clear golf is a bourgeois sport.” And let’s have no whining about Luton’s municipal golf course. Outside Scotland it’s a game where rich right wing people go to chill with their own kind. And as Chávez points out it doesn’t even get you fit since lots of them drive around in those silly little carts

Golf courses are  eyesores and environmental catastrophes. In countries where people cannot always be guaranteed reliable supplies of safe water the quantities used to keep the grass resembling what you might find in Surrey are a gratuitous insult to those living in squalor. This is not quite how the story has been reported and much of the coverage has tried to make it into evidence of Chavez’s eccentricity. The US State Department took the opportunity to sneer slightly with one of its golf loving officials making clear that Chavez is still persona non grata in Washington. “And once again Mr. Chavez, one of the hemisphere’s most divisive figures, finds himself out of bounds.”

What didn’t get widely reported is rather more interesting than the silly sports story. Much of the housing stock in Venezuela is abysmal, particularly in the barrios around Caracas. Not just is much of it very poor there is a shortage of 1.8 million dwellings. Chavez has decided to take a refreshingly confrontational approach saying “many rich people seized land to build factories, parking lots… they can go elsewhere. We are going to build housing for the people.” That’s fairly basic social democracy but in a Latin American setting even something as basic as providing reasonable homes for people is almost a revolutionary gesture.