As Francis Joyon bears down implacably on Dame Ellen MacArthur’s solo round-the-world sailing record, so MacArthur wishes him Godspeed in public and, in private, plots her own counter-assault. At least, that’s what she’ll be doing if she’s half the person I think she is.

For this is a glorious duel. It is a sort of mixed singles event that is taking place, not over a few sets on a summer afternoon, but over years and thousands of miles. And as it does so, I find myself pondering on the difference between sport and adventure.

Sailing round the world in any fashion at all is an adventure. But trying to beat somebody’s record makes it a competition as well, which makes it at least something to do with sport. It also has genuine, nonmetaphorical life-and-death implications, which makes it unlike most sports.

I am fascinated by climbing, mostly because any eminence above 16 hands gives me the shivers. A climber once told me that beauty was “a handhold no thicker than the rim of this pint glass and your feet smearing on nothing”. An adventure, then.

But climbing also has a competitive structure. The French, big in sailing and climbing, especially their competitive sides, have a special appreciation for the strange Tom Tiddler’s ground between sport and adventure.

We Brits prefer clearer classifications. We like the unambiguous opposition of “proper” sport; when opponents include rocks and winds and mountain-high seas, we get confused. There are long-distance gliding competitions, in which albatross-winged scraps of nothing navigate from thermal to thermal, battling the nipping and eager airs thousands of feet up, and with them, each other.

That seldom gets reported as sport. We consider it private adventure. There are times when I’m inclined to think that adventure is a bigger thing than sport.

Authorities right to try to whip sport into shape

Eddie Ahern, a Flat race jockey, was banned for three months for bringing racing into disrepute. He was apparently trying to do a David Beckham: to offend on purpose, so that the automatic ban came at a time convenient to the offender.

Ahern had a suspension due for excessive use of the whip, so he laid into a horse called Marsam, hitting him 20 times in two furlongs, and in the wrong place; the horse finished covered in weals.

The British Horseracing Authority wielded the whip itself. Not fooled, it handed out an exceptional sentence. But it exposes a problem in racing’s culture, and this is the belief that whip offences are all to do with image. Many racing insiders think racing is getting soft to satisfy troublemaking, bleeding-heart liberals who don’t understand horses and racing.

Jockeys grouse that they are the only athletes in the world who get punished for trying too hard. Others say that if you backed the horse, you want it given every chance, never mind the biffs and bashes. Yet more say, and rightly, that no one used to care. Lester Piggott’s Derby-winning use of the whip on The Minstrel in 1977 would have earned him a ban today.

But people finding the public spectacle of men beating the crap out of horses unacceptable is an advance, not a regression. Certainly, most horses would think so. Racing needs to convince itself that a violent attack on a horse is not something that looks bad. It is bad. Anyone in racing who thinks otherwise is bringing racing into disrepute.

Governing body should not be running scared over Pistorius

Well, you sort of know what they’re on about, but all the same, I can’t help feeling that athletics has got it slightly wrong about Oscar Pistorius, the “blade-running” South African.

Pistorius is a double amputee and is keen to run in the Olympic Games. The IAAF has set up a series of tests to see if it is happy with the idea and preliminary rumblings are going against Pistorius. “He has a considerable advantage compared with athletes without prosthetic limbs,” Professor Peter Bruggemann, who is carrying out the tests, said.

I can’t help thinking that anyone who can turn what is literally a crippling disadvantage into an advantage should be given every possible encouragement, but the IAAF is more interested in the biomechanical purity of its sport than in the purity of sporting morality. Or perhaps it is worried that if a man with no legs from the knee down is allowed to compete with “a considerable advantage”, then all the other athletes will set about self-mutilation.

But then that’s the situation that already exists, isn’t it?

Brittle England appear pitiful as Sri Lanka pass test of hardness

As the soft-centred England cricket team lost the Test series comprehensively in Sri Lanka, so Christopher Martin-Jenkins has been complaining almost daily about their habit of hurling the ball to the wicketkeeper every time it comes near them, as if the most fabulous Jonty Rhodes run-out was on the cards. And the batsman never leaves his crease.

This is clearly a matter of policy. It is intended to show that England are alert in the field, aggressive, well ’ard, and the ball whistling past the batsman’s head into the wicketkeeper’s gloves is supposed to cow him into awed respect. CMJ is right to complain. It looks pathetic and it doesn’t work.

The Sri Lankans adopted a different policy. Their devious game plan was to show that they were well ’ard by performing better in every aspect of the game, including fielding.

Wasn’t I advocating the Sri Lankans as a template for England just the other week? It’s only soft men who need to remind you that they’re hard.