As Roger Federer collected his twelfth grand-slam title the weekend before last, working on Novak Djokovic in the US Open final in a way that was positively miraculous, it was clear why he was the best tennis player in the world. But is he the best player of anything?* If we use as the criterion a complete dominance of his sport, he is pretty close and if we add to this a reinvention of the sport as well, Federer is looking still better.

In the big team sports, there is nobody to touch him: if people are talking about Cristiano Ronaldo as the world’s best footballer, it is clear that there is no Pelé or even a Diego Maradona playing. Muttiah Muralitharan and Sachin Tendulkar have claims in cricket, but it is hard to dominate cricket. Only Don Bradman and, perhaps, Shane Warne have managed it.

Asafa Powell has just set a record for the 100 metres of 9.74sec and you cannot rule out the fastest human being in history from the discussion. But his recent failure at the World Championships excludes him; you need medals as well as records.

There is a strong contender in Kenenisa Bekele, the world and Olympic champion at 10,000 metres and the world record-holder at 10,000 and 5,000 metres. He has also done something nobody else has, winning the long-course and short-course World Cross Country Championships in the same year. He has done it five times, to show that it wasn’t a fluke.

As dominatrix of a single event, you cannot top Yelena Isinbayeva, the pole vaulter. She has set 20 world records and will set more.

But perhaps you require more than one event. In that case, I give you Carolina Klüft, the Swedish heptathlete, who, like Federer, conducts her business in courtesy and good vibes. She is world and Olympic champion, unbeaten in multi-events for five years. If Federer has a rival for the world’s leading athlete, it is she.

* Apologists for a certain Eldrick Woods should know that sports in which you don’t have to run about are excluded from consideration.

Days when they were only here for the beer

Has any sport changed as dramatically over 20 years as rugby union? The players at the World Cup are fitter, faster and stronger than ever. But as Paul Rendell, England prop at that first World Cup, said: “We didn’t take it seriously in 1987. I can remember thinking, ‘As long as we have a good time, everything will be OK.’ Then we got to the World Cup and we couldn’t believe it - the New Zealanders had been training. Bloody cheats. They had matching training tops and proper coaches and everything. We’d never seen anything like it. It was as if they had let us down – broken ranks.”

England’s response was to hold a beauty pageant, won by the hooker, Brian Moore, in a high-top bathing costume. All this comes from Alison Kervin’s splendid history of the World Cup, Thirty Bullies. She writes of some of the once-traditional part of what we thought were serious, grown-up sporting events; how Rendell, as team judge in various facetious trials, sentenced people to shave off moustaches or to be tied to a tree for three hours and forced to sing Chanson d’Amour every ten minutes. Eventually, in reprisal, Rendell was summarily tried, sentenced to dress as a Fijian maiden, covered in boot polish, shoved into a grass skirt and given a pink wig.

Now all this is fascinating to an anthropologist, not mention a Freudian psychologist. But to a student of sport, it also matters. This was the last big-time international sport in which winning came second to pleasure. Admittedly, most of us would sooner play rugby union (or even golf) than take part in such pleasures, but in the present sporting climate of “winning is everything”, it is worth remembering that sport was not always like that. Rugby union was the last hold-out.

So who really holds whip hand: human or horse?

Daisy Dick was describing her successful attempt at the hardest jump on the cross-country course at the European Three-Day Event Championships in Italy last weekend. She said that, as she approached the third element, her control was far from absolute, but the horse was locked on to the obstacle like a fence-seeking missile and jumped it anyway. High as a kite on her triumph, she asked the sky: “Why do they do it?”

A question that has, from time to time, been asked by everyone involved in any of the horsey sports, or, for that matter, by the million and more people who ride for the hell of it. This strange affinity between species and species has been developing for countless millenniums, since humans discovered that keeping half a ton of animal close by was a lot more reliable than hunting.

Even then, no doubt, there would have been people who were better at coping with horses than others and these days there are many people, myself included, who can’t live without the bloody things, while the rest of the world looks on bewildered.

As for the horses, their adaptation to human ways has made them the most numerous as well as the most pampered equids on the planet All wild equids, save Burchell’s zebra, are endangered, but Equus caballus goes from strength to strength. And rather than answer Dick’s question, I ask: who’s exploiting whom?