I am seriously thinking of throwing a pout and refusing to go to the Olympic Games this summer. The confirmation that Carolina Klüft will not be competing in the heptathlon has put me into deep mourning. She is worth travelling halfway round the world on her own.

And do you know why she won't be doing it? Because the heptathlon is no fun any more. Can you imagine that? She has more or less turned down a gold medal, for she is undefeated in multi-event competitions for seven years. She didn't want the fame, the glory or the money. She only wanted the fun.

Klüft is from Sweden, not a nation famous for its sense of fun. She used to take a stuffed toy with her to competitions, but not as a lucky mascot. It was a sermon. The stuffed toy was Eeyore and its function was to remind her that sport is for fun. Fun-filled, she cantered past all the professional Eeyores, the fun-averse, single-minded professional athletes whose spiritual home is Eeyore's field, “rather boggy and sad”.

In the World Championships of 2003 Klüft had two no-jumps in the long jump. You are only allowed three goes - one more duff jump and she was out. But she hammered into her third jump and practically flew out of the pit. These things simply don't register as a crisis if you are out there for fun. In the Olympic Games in Athens, I watched her struggle in the shot. On her last throw, roaring herself into defiance, she beat her personal best by two clear feet.

Hinterland. That's what it comes down to. And like most things in sport, it's a double-edged thing. Klüft pulled out these extraordinary feats of recovery, this wonderful series of linked performances, because there has always been more to her life than athletics. She studies “peace and development”; she works for Unicef; she has connections with a village in Kenya.

Klüft embodies the principle that sport is not, as commentators always tell you, “all about who wants it most”. She showed that for her, it was all about who wants it least. But now, her hinterland has claimed her, robbed her of gold. She no longer cares enough. I salute that. In a way, it is more extraordinary, and more praiseworthy, than hanging on for one more gold medal.

I remember her winding the crowd into a frenzy, slapping her thighs and her face with ferocious, stinging blows, to drive herself to further excesses of performance, relishing every aspect of the occasion and always finding something more. She is going to try to qualify for the individual jumps, not because she has a gold-medal chance, but because it's fun. I wish her joy, oceans of it: but I am inconsolable.

Cricket rallies behind Marcus Trescothick

One of the most unexpected things in sport has been the compassion shown to the England batsman, Marcus Trescothick. He retired from international cricket at the weekend, which was formal acknowledgement of a situation we knew about. He can no longer bear to travel.

In former times, old players and columnists would have told him to snap out of it, get on with it, be a man: why become a sportsman if you can't take the heat? But no. Trescothick has been dealt with gently by everyone.

Trescothick, far from confronting the problem with macho denial, has spoken with dismaying frankness. Mental problems are no longer, even in sport, invariably seen as a sign of weakness. They are there, waiting to grab anyone. For a touring cricketer, defeat, loneliness and claustrophobic companionship can be hard to bear. The cricket community has united in its response: “There but for the grace of God...”

Are McClaren and McLaren cut from the same fraying cloth?

Small things can tell you when big things are wrong. When a cricket team implodes, you frequently see the first signs of it in the fielding. We saw subtle signs of aimlessness in the England football team in Steve McClaren's worst matches. We have seen the bizarre inconsistency of the England rugby union team under Brian Ashton.

Yesterday the McLaren Mercedes Formula One team lost 12 seconds and wasted a previous moment of pure brilliance from their driver, Lewis Hamilton, as they made a mess of a pitstop in the Malaysian Grand Prix. Was this just bad luck, a cack-handed mechanic, a recalcitrant bit of kit? Or is it symptomatic of deeper ills within the team, problems that go back to the scandal and the spying that destroyed the previous season?

Will this latest incident leave them full of fury and eroding trust, or will they laugh it off? Is it a blip - or is there something rotten in the state of McLaren?

Mao Asada's golden moment of pure courage

Anyone who thinks that figure skating is not a sport is invited to walk across an ice-rink and jump up and down. I tell you, it's slippery out there. The more extreme your manoeuvre, the more likely you are to fall over. Nijinsky performed the miraculous entrechat-dix, but at least he landed on firm ground. But a triple axel has to be perfect. If it isn't, you are on your bum.

Figure skating is one of sport's high-wire acts; and perhaps the most regularly humiliating. I watched Mao Asada, of Japan, going into her first jump, a triple axel - the big one in women's competition, it requires 3 revolutions - and she fell on take-off. It was as if she was attached to the ice by bungee straps. I expected her to move on from error to error, murdering Chopin with a rictus of a smile, too much make-up and ice in her knickers.

But no. She got up and skated perfection: six triples, four doubles, wonderful elevation on every jump and all the flow and lyricism you could want in between. It was enough to give her the gold medal at the World Championships in Gothenburg and it was as wonderful and as pure a piece of sport as you could wish for.

Hemingway defined courage as “grace under pressure”; you could hardly find a better example.

Asada is 17.

One hundred and counting for David Beckham

We have all been getting excited about David Beckham's chance of winning his 100th cap when England play France on Wednesday. Rather more interesting is the question of the caps that follow. Fabio Capello, the England manager, comes from a Catholic country, but surely he has more in mind than ritual and ceremonial and veneration of a holy image. It is his job to think long term - a two-year plan at the very least.

So presumably he has some kind of notion of Beckham, below, playing a role for England during qualification for the 2010 World Cup. Instead of debating, once again, Beckham's well-chronicled past, we should be wondering about the next chapter. Is there really going to be one? He wouldn't be around the England set-up if it wasn't a possibility.