Taking sport too seriously

Death in sport is aberrant, let's be clear. That's the whole point about sport. We worked out a way for the finest specimens of every land to compete against each other with every ounce of their being, with the weight of their countries/families/teams upon them, but without the death. Sport is better than conquest, better than war, better than diplomacy. If people regularly die in sport, what's the point of it? Might as well go and have a duel instead. It's taken a while for some sports to fully get the hang of this. There has been too much death in some sports, far too much. Watching horse racing as I was growing up, I struggled with a sport where death for its participants was so regular and no reason to stop the show. But how could it be any other way? And boxing, you might say, boxing, only ever one second away from tragedy? Prizefighters still suffer terrible injuries, sometimes, rarely, even death. As a boxing fan, I can't shy away from that. I know what t...

Am I a secret Man U fan? This is a difficult question to answer, but there is a clue in the fact that I once wrote a poem called 'I am a Secret Man U fan'. So now you know several of my dark secrets all at once. I'm not a Man U fan, by the way, I'm a Spurs fan, but sometimes if a plumber comes round, sees my book shelf with Sir Alex Ferguson's autobiography lined up next to Ryan Giggs' and the 'Class of 92' DVD and asks "Are you a Man U fan then?" and I say "No, I'm a Spurs fan", he's entitled to look a little puzzled. I'm not a Man U fan, I'm a Spurs fan. Go the Lillywhites, rahrahrah. I've been a Spurs fan since 1985 and my favourite player is Mitchell Thomas or Vinny Samways and, wow, it's been an exciting few decades to be a Spurs fan, what with all the silverware, title challenges and down-to-the-wire relegation struggles. No, in short, when your own team habitually finishes between 4th and 14th and wi...

Although I've watched a fair bit of live sport, I've not often felt I was watching something truly important and magical in the context of the wider world. You mainly need to pay the bigger bucks for that or get lucky. I'm not complaining, I've watched plenty of great stuff, as I hope I'll come to, but what I'm going to write about now stands out in my experience as being a sporting occasion people will talk about for years to come. I almost didn't get to see it. My friend Alexander had acquired a couple of sets of tickets for the Lord's Ashes test of 2009 in the ballot, and he offered me one for the 5th day. I recognised the danger in this (the 5th day might well see no cricket) but knew it could be the big winner. You may recall - England had barely held on to draw the first test in Cardiff, but then unexpectedly dominated the 2nd test at Lord's. They set Australia 500odd with a couple of days to go and victory seemed inevitable. And Oz seemed ...

Right from the start, I believed being ok at sport entitled me to being treated like I was a bit special. And right from the start, I was disabused of the notion. I'm going back to my first competitive sports matches, a football double-header for Colet Court Under-9s vs King's College Junior School, Wimbledon Under 9s. The big one. The derby of derbies. I remember the sheer thrill of being picked for the team by our esteemed coach, Dave Groombridge (notoriously in the Guinness Book of Records for letting in the fastest hat-trick ever as goalkeeper for Leyton Orient) with his relentless side-footing practise and famous catchphrases (all of which I seem, infamously, to have forgotten, apart from "Play the way you're facing!" which somehow doesn't seem like an evocative catchphrase, just a common football instruction. Oh well). I was confident I'd be picked despite mistakenly telling him I was left-footed, so keen was I to be so, but mistakes were made ...

Those London Olympics, they were good, weren't they? In all kinds of ways, on all sorts of levels. I was lucky enough to see my fair share of Olympic and Paralympic action. Amidst various bids for high-end sought after tickets, my Olympic banker was a bit of early-rounds afternoon boxing. It was in the ExCel Centre in Docklands, and I took my mother. It was the first view of live boxing for both of us. I am an enormous boxing fan, watching it on TV whenever I can, whereas my mother does not at least find the idea of boxing repugnant, as many reasonably do. There is a lot less to find repugnant and upsetting in amateur boxing than professional boxing, so it's a good "in" for any casual, hesitant boxing fans. Gloves are bigger, headguards are worn, fights are shorter, and the aim of the game is to pick off your opponent with neat punches rather than damage them. At any sign of a boxer being remotely damaged, a fight will be stopped. We got to see four second rou...

This entry will be a bit of a cheat - I'll touch on various levels of sport, from the most personal to the most distant, from the disastrous to the triumphant and back again. It'll be about 2003 but also a little about 1984 and 1988, 2002 and 2004. The performance I'm starting with is what is widely considered by statisticians as the greatest single performance in the history of women's track and field, Paula Radcliffe's astonishing world record of 2 hrs 15 minutes 25 seconds at the London Marathon, a mark which, to this day, no one else has got within a couple of minutes of. I didn't see it. I have watched the London Marathon every other year of my life since 1984 but that one, I didn't see. I was elsewhere. In Barbados, to be precise. So don't feel sorry for me! I've seen Paula Radcliffe run other marathons, her astonishing debut in 2002, where she first pushed back the boundaries of what it was possible for a woman to achieve at the distance...