North Korea’s qualification for next year’s football World Cup finals has had the media smiling gleefully at the prospect, overusing corny references to “bombshells” and pondering the possibilities of the culture clash in South Africa next summer. All of which is perfectly well founded.

This year, when North Korea lost 1-0 to South Korea, they returned to Pyongyang from Seoul claiming that their players had been poisoned before the match. The role that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, will play also remains a subject of fascination. Kim is occasionally reported to have attended matches in North Korea.

But his own sporting talent is also worth studying because, despite being 68 and plagued by bad health, according to his Wikipedia entry the North Korean state media reports that he routinely has three or four holes in one per round of golf.

Phelps' publishing career a turn-up for the books
Michael Phelps was beaten twice at an international swimming meeting in Santa Clara, California, last weekend, his second competitive return to the pool since last year’s Olympics and a second unsuccessful attempt to recreate former glories. However, he is way ahead of his competitors in the publishing industry.

Not content with his autobiography and another contribution from his mother, Phelps has written a children’s book entitled How to Train with a T.Rex and Win 8 Gold Medals. Parents of wannabe swimmers should be warned that his key to success was six years of training, in which he swam 12,480 miles. This, he explains, is the equivalent of swimming “from my home town of Baltimore to the North Pole and back, and doing it all over again”.

Penguins pick up Stanley Cup and sink it
The abuse of sporting trophies has a long and rich history, although none perhaps as rich as ice hockey’s Stanley Cup. The cup has been photographed taking a swim in the pool of Mario Lemieux, the Pittsburgh Penguins owner and former player, after the team’s win last week. The previous known time the cup had a dip was after the Penguins’ success in 1992, when it took a dive off Lemieux’s four-tier neon-lit waterfall.