Sport

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 12 November 2015

A marathon of cheats Russian athletes may be stripped of the medals they won at the 2012 Olympics, but what of the earliest-known drug-taker in the modern Olympics? Thomas Hicks won the 1904 marathon in St Louis after taking two doses of brandy laced with strychnine. —Hicks collapsed on the finishing line and had to be revived. There being no rule at the time against drugs, he was allowed to keep his gold medal. — Not so a man who reached the finishing line ahead of him, fellow American Fred Lorz. He was disqualified after admitting that he had taken a car most of the way. Police, camera, revenue The

Taki

High life | 12 November 2015

Those who forget the pasta are condemned to reheat it, tweeted Jon Ronson, a man I’d never heard of until his quip about spaghetti. I read about the tweet in a newspaper, as I’ve never used social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — and hope that I never will. Why would I, unless I wanted to make trouble for myself? Not everyone needs to know what you’re doing all of the time. Or any of the time, for that matter. They say that the most destructive four-letter word in the digital domain is ‘send’. (Just as the scariest three words in American literature are Joyce Carol Oates.) I recently received

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Of course there’s no morality in top-level sport

Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had acquired was every bit as authentic as the one they had jubilantly renounced. So a separate toilet is surely otiose. And not just that, but the suggestion that they might need a separate toilet for micturition through their surgically emended private parts is surely offensive. The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, may be in trouble, then, for announcing his intention to install these mysterious receptacles throughout the Palace of Westminster to service the hordes of transgendered workers wandering around with extravagant beehive hairdos and outsize stiletto heels.

Thursday

Niru Ratnam

Cut funding to sport (which we’re no good at) and give it to the arts (which we are)

This morning Art Review announced its ‘Power 100’, a list of movers and shakers of the international art world. Last year the list was topped by Sir Nicholas Serota who beat off the likes of Larry Gagosian, Ai Weiwei and Jeff Koons. The reason behind Serota’s position was Tate’s considerable international influence across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Art Review’s editor Mark Rappolt says, ‘it operates an institution as a network of patrons and interests that spread far beyond the limits of its physical building.’ Serota has slipped down the rankings a little this year but he’s been joined near the top by the dynamic directors of the Serpentine, Hans Ulrich

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 24 September 2015

Available for parties Labour deputy leader Tom Watson said that leaving his party to join the Liberal Democrats would be like ‘leaving the Beatles to join a Bananarama tribute band’. Is there such a thing? Bananaruma is a Leicester-based band led by the head of arts at a local secondary school. They advertise an hour-long show, for which they bring their own professional PA system with full lighting show. So far they have had one booking, at the Stamford Arms in Groby on 25 July. Tickets cost £20, including a three-course meal, with a bottle of bubbly thrown in for tables of six who booked before 1 July. Sporting chances

Thursday

Roger Alton

The right track

Sebastian Coe’s new job as head of world athletics will be a heck of a lot easier thanks to the outstanding World Championships that just finished in Beijing. He has a chance to push athletics back to the forefront of world sport — after all, what is more thrilling than one human being trying to outrun another? The star was Usain Bolt, but even that unassuming giant of a man cannot go on for ever. Athletics needs characters, champions that people can identify with, preferably in the blue–riband events. And Beijing showed there are outstanding athletes waiting to step forward. Julius Yego took gold in the javelin with a throw

Thursday

Simon Barnes

Best of enemies

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3″ title=”Alex Massie and Michael Henderson discuss England’s victory against Australia” startat=1184] Listen [/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip. Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope. Thank God I was leaving: those poor buggers

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Big ask

‘That’s unnecessarily crude,’ said my husband, turning momentarily from the television and improving the shining minute by setting the whisky glass chinking. (He takes ice in it.) ‘What? A “big ask”? That’s not crude,’ I replied. ‘Oh, ask,’ he said in a sort of liquid-hoarse whisky-throaty voice seldom remarked upon by phoneticians. He was watching sport, so the cliché came as no surprise to me. The sports pages are thick with it. Jeremain Lens, whoever he is, may be ‘an exciting player but proving it in the Premier League is a big ask’. For gee-gees, a big ask is graduating from winning a maiden to a good Group 2 race.

Roger Alton Roger Alton

Champions of absurdity

Jumping the shark isn’t yet an Olympic sport, but if it were the International Olympic Committee would be a shoo-in for gold. And silver and bronze too. Amid some low-key hoopla last week, the IOC awarded the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing. Yes, that’s the same Beijing that staged the 2008 Olympics and in a couple of weeks will put on the World Athletics Championships. The 2022 bidding boiled down to a two-horse race between Almaty, Kazakhstan, which at least has some snow; and Beijing, which doesn’t. The previous front-runner, Oslo, withdrew its bid last autumn after all the main political parties rejected the funding plans for the Games. It

Mark Palmer

The ugly game

What a terrific summer of sport it’s been: a wonderful Wimbledon, a rollicking Royal Ascot, an absorbing Ashes series that still has the best part of two Tests to go. And now along comes football, barging its way on to the back pages, shoving the other sports aside, sniggering all the way to the bank. Every August, the ‘beautiful game’ reasserts itself as the playground bully. Football is the most popular sport in this country — and the nastiest. It has become a cesspit of greed, debauchery and racism, especially in Britain. It is crude and overbearing and has all the subtlety of a disco at Holy Communion. I feel

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 30 July 2015

Safe house Lord Sewel is unique in leaving the House of Lords in disgrace. Until the House of Lords Reform Act 2014, only a treason conviction earned you expulsion from the House of Lords, and that only since 1870. At least two peers have been executed for treason, Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, and William Maxwell, 5th Earl Nithsdale, but both well before this date. — Thanks to the 2014 Act it is now possible to have your Lords membership terminated on two grounds: being jailed for a criminal offence with a sentence of more than one year, or failing to turn up for a whole session. But you cannot

Thursday

Roger Alton

Australia’s comeback kids

I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give up? In the past few days, they have pulled one out of the bag against the Springboks in the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when they looked buried; trailing 20—17 with time up, they turned down a penalty kick and went for the win with an 82nd-minute try. Their Davis Cup tennis boys came from 2—0 down to beat Kazakhstan, with Lleyton Hewitt hauling his weary muscles through the motions once more. Afterwards Hewitt said, ‘I love the back-against-the-wall situation. This is what dreams are made of.’ Now they face Britain,

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 16 July 2015

I have always been what I suppose one could call a weed, and a cowardly one at that. I never liked sports and was never any good at them. When fielding at cricket at my prep school, I used to while away time making daisy-chains. Of my part in football one prep-school report merely said, to my mother’s great amusement, ‘Chancellor prefers to avoid the ball.’ At my public school, where you had to choose between rowing and cricket, I chose rowing, but only because I was just small enough to get away with being a cox, which only involved sitting in the stern of a boat and bellowing orders

Thursday

Ben Markovits

Running out of time

Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their races and careers, and talks to them about their lives. Part of what’s moving about the book is the sense you get that these athletes (the children mostly of subsistence farmers from the Rift Valley in East Africa, who sometimes had to break rocks to pay for their primary schooling) were born with an inheritance as rich as any Notting Hill trustfunder’s — except that instead of stock options and the deeds to a house they have inherited a series of genetic codes which give them long, light legs and

Thursday

Alex Massie

Fun runs

Something wonderful is happening in English cricket. The Ashes are upon us and, at last, the England team seem determined to play the right way. The recent series against New Zealand was a revelation. The Kiwis’ have-a-go approach rubbed off and, for the first time in too long, England played as if cricket was more than a job. It could be fun too. Remember fun? We have seen it before. In 1981, at Headingley, England were revived by the rustic virtues of what their captain Mike Brearley called ‘blacksmith cricket’. See ball, hit ball. Bowl as fast as you can. Keep it simple. Trust yourself. For a long time England

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The oldest sport in the world

This is the best book you’ll ever read about mixed martial arts fighting; and this will still be the case even if it’s not the first book you’ve ever read about mixed martial arts fighting. Kerry Howley’s debut is a riotously entertaining and piercingly perceptive account of the contrasting lives and dreams of a pair of Iowa-based fighters whose battles in the ‘Octagon’ become the vehicle for a philosophical treatise on the nature of glory. One of these fighters, Sean Huffman, is a journeyman; the other, Erik Koch, has dreams of the big time which, in this instance, means Las Vegas. Huffman, by contrast, makes do with dingy fights in

Thursday

Rachel Johnson

Diary – 25 June 2015

My husband says I only write books in order to have a launch party. Not so. I also write books in order to give the author speech at the party. To this end, I hired a wild warehouse under the Westway flyover. Faced with a stream of emails from PAs asking things like whether vegan canapés would be served, and a direct call from financier Peter Soros asking whether 7 p.m. to midnight meant dinner or ‘cocktail prolongé’, I replied that it was BYOB — buy your own burgers. The great, the good, the bad, the ugly and the US ambassador streamed in to drink my wine out of plastic beakers.

Simon Barnes

Champions of hypocrisy

Wimbledon next week. Like the tournament dress code, all sports want their heroes white. In terms of virtue rather than skin colour. Sport demands the appearance of righteousness. Its default position is to pride itself on the moral lessons it teaches the rest of us. All of which makes sport one of the great hypocrisy opportunities of modern times, lagging behind only religion and politics. A sports star who wants to make serious money must set himself up as a ‘role model’. So when the great tennis player Andre Agassi was a boy in ‘hot lava’ shorts, he set himself up as a lovable ‘rebel’ who embraced Christian virtues. He

Thursday

Mary Killen

Your problems solved | 18 June 2015

Q. I was at the theatre recently and bumped into a well-known Liverpudlian crooner coming out of the disabled lavatory. She said ‘Don’t worry, luv, it’s fine to use them if no disabled people are waiting.’ Often theatre interval queues are long and in some of London’s better restaurants the ‘disabled toilet’ is closer, cleaner and more convenient. Is there a ruling on this or was Cilla correct? — N.C., Stanton St Bernard, Wilts A. Common sense tells us Cilla is right — but it is only correct to use disabled lavatories if you can be certain you will not thereby stymie the – possibly more urgent — need of

Thursday

Edmund Gordon

Confessions of a Fedhead

Good writing about sport is rare — and good writing about tennis is that much rarer — so it’s conspicuous that we’ve had so much of it about Roger Federer. The gold standard was set in 2006 with David Foster Wallace’s remarkable essay ‘Federer as Religious Experience’, in which the great novelist provided a dazzling analysis of the great player’s game. Then came Jon Wertheim’s Strokes of Genius (2010), an elegant account of the 2008 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal. In a letter published in Here and Now (2013), the correspondence between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, the latter contributed an uncharacteristically lyrical bit of praise for the