10 Favourite Sporting Moments This Century
You may recall I did something like this a few years ago. This time, mercifully, I'll be much briefer.
These will my personal favourites, and I'll try not to write more than a short paragraph or three on each. I'll also mention a couple of my least favourite sporting moments, because when a sport, or a sporting figure, brings you close enough to the action that you really care, the worst feeling is a hair's width from the best. I'll also ramble a bit at the end about how sport is bad, like the world.
I'll start with something that was surely the ultimate feelgood story.
John Terry slipping and missing his penalty in the 2008 Champions League Final
The reality is that, for most of us, as relatively nuanced and empathetic people, bad things happening to bad people are rarely, it turns out, as wholly satisfactory as good things happening to good people. Especially in the world of sport where "bad people vs good people" is, rarely, when examined, a wholly satisfactory concept. Even someone as rightly maligned as Novak Djokovic can evoke a certain admiration, interest and, occasi,onally, sympathy for the fact he has never attained the love he sought alongside the glory.
But every now and then, there's a perfect combination of stakes, setting, humour and pure loathing. In those innocent, innocent days, when Boris Johnson was only lately the mayor of London, the actual mayor of actual London, there were very few people I loathed more in the world than Big Daddy JT; the sight of him walking up, as he'd no doubt choreographed, to take the winning penalty in the Champions League Final, was very hard to take. Particularly as Man Utd had been far the better team on the day.
Even for the most neutral of neutrals - which I wasn't, as I very much liked that Man Utd team - the slip, the miss, the man sitting on his malevolent backside bemoaning the vicissitudes of fate, was a true heart melter, a moment of universal beauty in a too-often divisive world.
Looking back, that Man Utd team contained as many villains, but it still feels good, that result, it feels good for Ferguson that he got a second Champions League before Barcelona and Madrid flooded the way, and it just feels good that JT never got his Captain Fantastic moment.
Kelly Holmes in 2004
This, I think, is the most beautiful sporting moment, or rather, pair of moments, that exists. A 34-year-old runner who'd never won a major event, who'd endured injury after injury, near-miss after near-miss, whose inner turmoil and self-doubt were so close to the surface it was almost unbearable. Firstly, in the 800m, reaching that familiar closing stretch in contention, where she'd often put herself - only to be scooped for the major prize - inevitably beginning to look like she was drowning through treacle, yet, this time, miraculously, she found the will to push herself to drown through treacle a few millimetres faster than everybody else. And her face, of course, and the apotheosis of Steve Cram's fan/friend/expert commentary. Then, a few days later, in the 1500m, a world of self-belief away, rounding the final bend wide of the pack and giving the rest a couple of solid looks which said "I'm the best here, and I can win any way I want", then striding away to sporting perfection.
Amir Khan vs Marcos Maidana, 2010
Maligned as he remains, for all the reversals and humiliatiions he's endured, Amir Khan has this.
Marcos Maidana was considered pound-for-pound one of the hardest punchers in boxing. Khan was recently world champion, but still held in great suspicion for his gilded path and notoriously dodgy chin.
The fight took place around 4.30am UK time, and I, let me tell you, I was out. Out in London. That night. Can you imagine? Out like a young person. So, I was on my home to Tooting in a taxi and I had one of the pre-smartphones where you could kind of pick up some kind of ongoing news, but it was all a bit hit and miss, so I was following the fight as best as I could on my phone in occasional updates, and I'd seen Khan had managed an early knockdown, was leading, fighting well, that Maidana had had his moments but Khan was in control. I was dropped off, made my way up to my little flat, turned on the TV, literally a couple of seconds after Amir had been caught by Maidana's heaviest fist, and there he was, in the 10th round, staggering around the ring like a drunken child, with another 7 minutes or so to survive.
My heart beat like a train for those 7 minutes. I have never heard it louder in my life. I've never been so fearful and energised watching sport. Khan survived, even came back stronger, in the last couple of rounds, and ended up the winner. Boxing's a messed up sport with messed up values but it has its moments.
Mark Cavendish 2021
I would say I now think that Mark Cavendish is, there or thereabouts, the best British sportsperson of the century, and understanding why that is gets to the heart of what makes a great sportsperson.
Cavendish is the best, worldwide. to ever do the specific thing he does, and the specific thing he does requires Herculean amounts of stamina, bravery, smartness, instinct, ruthlessness and plain explosiveness. Like Kelly Holmes, he endured significant mental and physical challenges along the way.
Putting aside the bouts of depression and the Epstein-Barr virus, it's the falling off the bike that really does it for me. Just past his peak, Cav started crashing in frightening ways with excessive regularity. A lot of people do painful things in their sport, but there's something about regularly being knocked off your bike at 70 kph which most of us would not wish, or be able, to do more than once in our life, yet Cav did it over and over again.
Cav was finished years ago. It was horrible to watch. His speed had gone, his instinct had gone, his confidence had gone, his skin had gone. It was painful to watch and why didn't he retire. He had 30 Tour de France stage victories, 2nd only to Eddie Merckx. Surely that was enough. Yet this year, at 36, he was back in the Tour de France, after showing some decent early season form and because Sam Bennett, his team-mate, was injured.
The first (of four) stages of the 2021 Tour that he won was one of the most cathartic things I've ever seen. I cried. Mid-afternoon, summer, working, just cried with joy. He ended the Tour tied with Merckx, a few centimetres on weary legs away from breaking the stage record. Honestly, not that these things matter, his not being on the Sports Personality of the Year felt like a total dereliction.
Andy Murray winning Wimbledon 2013
Obvious, but no less true. Funny to think it felt like the culmination of a long, long road, but it was actually just halfway through Murray's career. In retrospect, it looks even better than it did at the time, now that Djokovic, his opponent, has been superhuman for so long since. Yet Murray dominated him that day, for the second time in a year, in a Grand Slam final. There have been other great moments since, but that was the greatest.
As the year before, when he'd lost in the final to Federer, I watched it with all my family at my niece's birthday, and the children were sadly neglected as we crowded round the TV and lived every shot, not truly believing it could be won until the very last shot. If I'd been alone, I'd have changed channel unable to watch, or gone for a walk. But company kept me in my seat, thank goodness.
Djokovic and Murray, two childhood friends, born a couple of weeks apart. One may well be the best tennis player of all time. But we're so glad we've got the other one.
Spurs vs Ajax, 2019 Champions League semi-final
What is a sporting moment if it ends up meaning next to nothing? Spurs reached the Champions League final thanks to a ridiculous comeback, 3-0 down on aggregate with 45 minutes left, still going out with a minute to go, then Lucas Moura completing his hat-trick and winning the tie on an away goal. It was one of those rare moments in football, like Aguero's winner in the 2012 Premier League finale, when one goal is worth two goals, where victory vs defeat hangs in one single moment.
I watched the game in the back room. The child had lately gone to sleep, and I celebrated with the most absurd, padded-room, silent physical exultation. I thought "it doesn't matter what happens in the final, this is this". But Spurs were desultory in a desultory final, losing to a merely competent Liverpool. It did matter.
Yet still, for Spurs of all clubs, the club of Danny Blanchflower, perhaps the glory of that moment was enough. Even though it has solidified Spurs' reputation as a nearly club, given even more grounds for both greater and lesser clubs to laugh at Spurs who think they're something and end up with nothing. Yet, still, it was glorious.
The Cricket, 2019
If we're talking moments, it's this. Archer, Guptill, Roy, Buttler. I was in the downstairs room, the child lately asleep. This time at that fateful dislodging, there was an unhelpful explosion of noise I'd been just about able to withhold a couple of months earlier.
An interesting thing to remember - doom in sport often feels inevitable. We feel the spiralling defeat of our favourite from a long way, we feel we don't get the breaks. Chelsea win, Djokovic wins, Brady wins. But England have won, let's say, three major global sports tournaments this century, depending on your definition of major and global. Men's rugby, women's cricket, men's cricket. And they've all been thrillingly down to the wire, and they've all been, in their way, lucky.
The England men's football team's penalty shoot out nightmares have wrongly created the impression this is an unlucky sporting nation, and one that does not take the clutch moments. It's not really so. It's win some lose some. Get the breaks sometimes, sometimes not.
This is my favourite England cricket moment, although the Ashes 2005, with 2009 not that far behind, was more of an extended joy, a summer of such implied meaning. But my nerves make me miss so much cricket, behind real and metaphorical sofas, that sometimes I'm not there for the actual moments. But this time I was.
The Cricket 2017
As I was this time. Also, the World Cup Final at Lord's. Also a nail-biter. England's women defeated India by nine runs. A similar euphoric feeling, but discernably different.
To try to explain, in a way that doesn't sound like I'm virtue-signalling, not that there's always something. wrong with virtue-signalling, why it's pleasing to me that women's sports, particularly football and cricket, are now seen as successful, enjoyable, valuable and excellent ... it's simply this: I like things to be complete, I like integrity. Just as I like the idea of London having four sides of equal worth and interest, I like the idea of women's and men's sport being equal sides of the same coin. Having the same level of competition, support, of stars and drama. I like full stadiums and gripping games. I like people being neither contemptuous nor patronising.
I've watched way more men's sport than women's sport in my life, of course, so I was more deeply invested in the men's cricket triumph., particularly as this was the women's team's 4th triumph, not 1st. But I've watched way more women's sport than most people, and the fact that when it had it' biggest platform in this country, the game was a gripping, beautiful, spectacle in front of packed Lord's felt like a significant and joyful thing.
Robbie Keane 2002
My first grand experience of what has become a familiar phenomenon - the shifting of time. In O'Neill's off Cambridge Circus one summer morning, watching Ireland give Germany a good game in a room at the back, the only spot there was space for me. 1-0 down in the last minuted. There's a through ball - suddenly, a weird thing, the place is roaring .... what, why ... then Robbie Keane scores. And, of course, our TV was a couple of seconds behind the other TV in the place. We're all used to that now - I experienced it this summer, watching England-Ukraine, and I heard the roars from the pub 100m away a second or two before each of England's four goals.
Johnson-Thompson 2012-2021
The heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson has probably been my favourite sportsperson of the last decade, and her travails offer a way to traverse from the good to the bad. Much as I enjoyed the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics of 2021, my abiding memory is the gutting sight of Johnson-Thompson, short of training, returning from a serious achilles injury, coming to the end of a first day that had surpassed expectation and would have left her still with an outside chance of the gold, in full stride around the 200m benf, only to pull up, injured, this time the opposite leg from the one originally injured.
So it goes. I hope she's recovered well. She's still world champion, and that dominant display at Doha in 2019 felt like a culmination and vindication that made all the previous bad luck and narrow failure mean nothing. For me, heptathlon is the best track and field discipline, more thrilling and concise than the men's decathlon, allowing the best, like KJT, Jessica Ennis-Hill and Nafi Thiam to be genuinely world class in a number of the individual events.
But failure is miserable, whatever you've won before. Bad luck is miserable, injury is miserable. We spectators don't see the worst of it. When they smile it off. or cry it off, we like to imagine they're consoled and they're phlegmatic and determined, and they're over the worst of it a week later. That sport is, after all, just sport.
Christie
Which brings me to my least favourite series of sporting happenings (since it's Winter Olympics time). Over the course of three events in each of two Winter Olympics (2014 and 2018), the Scottish world champion short track speed skater Elise Chrisie endured a series of crashes, injuries and harsh disqualifications straight out of the Book of Job.
It would have been funny if it wasn't somehow unbearable. The pain, the gradual disintegration, not just of the athlete but of the integrity of the sport. You know what, I ended up thinking, this ain't a good sport. It's exciting, but it's too random, it's too unfair, it's too brutal.
....
Then again, when you start thinking about it, that's true of lots of sports. Random and cruel and unfair. The kind of stuff people have to live with forever.
I have been a sport fan all my life - that is what I am more than anything else. Most of this century, as opposed to the last, as a watcher, not participant. Watching sport in the 21st century puts you, I believe, a step ahead. In these two and a bit decades, sport has lost its innocence, or its veneer, in a dramatic way. How do you deal with that as a sports fan? Do you turn off in disgust? Or do you learn to stop worrying and love the bomb? Or do you keep watching in disgust? A bit of all three.
More sportspeople are doping than one could ever have imagined. More sport is fixed than one could have imagined. More sports tournaments are beset are won by bribery and beset by human rights abuses. Your favourite sportsmen are bullies, abusers, rapists and murderers, and their sports are invested in covering them up.
When it comes to politics, there's a strain of sensible, expert, seemingly well-intentioned anti-conspiracism. Conspiracism is seen as a dangerous force. Mostly, it's incompetence and stupidity that runs politics, not widespread collusion. You silly little people.
But if you follow sport, you know that there are networks of bribery and corruption that run to the very top of all the world's biggest sports. You know that national committees do their best to make sure their star turn's adverse tests are hushed up, you know that the cheats are always a step ahead. It's conspiracy. What other word would you use? And sport does not, on the surface, run rampant without checks and balances.
Any of these moments I'm describing here could be tainted at any moment, indeed some of them have been. That's sport. You love it, you live with it. It helps you understand the world.
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