I spoke briefly on the BBC World Service last week because I think the World Service is a good thing. I didn't speak about the stuff we had planned, though, because the presenter asked a different set of questions. (Well, what's the point of researchers if you actually listen to them?) But never mind all that. One of these unexpected questions was about the moral responsibility of athletes, and it has been nagging me.

We were talking about China and the Olympic Games and I was asked what the average athlete felt about Tibet and Darfur and China's human rights record. The answer, of course, is very little. It's not their job to. But is that a good thing, or is it a very bad thing?

We routinely praise the great performers of the Olympic Games for their dedication, their single-mindedness, their ability to select one thing from all the chaos and opportunities of life and make themselves supremely good at it. We respect, in a sense, we demand narrowness of vision. We want our athletes to be monomaniacs, for we see monomania as an aspect of victory.

It's unfair, then, to expect athletes to be monomaniacs and renaissance polymaths at the same time. The trick can't be done. Oh, there are exceptions, and good on 'em, but they are very rare. And if you have been encouraged to dedicate your life to a single goal, you are entitled to feel bewildered if someone suddenly tells you to think about something else; and, for example, turn down your chance of a medal because you are unhappy about Darfur.

Sebastian Coe was always an athlete with a hinterland and he became a politician, but he didn't go along with Margaret Thatcher's request to boycott the Moscow Olympic Games of 1980 on political grounds.

Better to run.

China is a vast and complex place and ditto issue. It is neither to be understood nor improved by the striking of attitudes. The Olympic Games in China will be an opening of eyes; our eyes are already being opened to the emergence and the meaning of China and Chinese eyes are being opened to the ways of the rest of the world. You don't get the Olympic Games on your own terms.

That is something that the Chinese Government is in the process of learning; Britain will do so soon enough, when people will ask, among other things, if it is right for an Olympic host to be involved in Iraq.

But anyone who thinks that athletes should stand up and be counted on international issues has misunderstood quite a lot of things. The truth is that we shouldn't expect athletes - or anyone else - to take moral stands on our behalf.

Mane man Sidebottom delivers perfect response

Which of us does not yearn for the day when the Twelfth Men rise up and take over the earth, when the substitutes and the reserves, the overlooked and the underrated rise up to claim what is rightfully theirs? But every now and then it happens in real life and there is more joy in a single reserve coming good than there is in 999 lifelong champions.

So that is why I am singing the praises of Ryan Sidebottom, the one-cap wonder, the man who went wicketless in the one Test match they let him play and then vanished into the counties for six years. But he came back and now he is England's No1. Some see this as a validation of county cricket. For me, it feels more like an individual's victory over rejection.

The consensus is that Sidebottom needed to be put back into county cricket so that he could emerge fully baked. But I am inclined to see his initial rejection as a classic haircut judgment. Sidebottom, with his fine head of curls, does not look like a cricketer. Had he worn a more conventional haircut, he would have got a second chance, a much quicker recall.

It is not a policy of neatness; rather, it is unconscious prejudice. Sidebottom has never looked a Test match-winning bowler, therefore he can't be one. Now he has left New Zealand as man of the series with 24 wickets. Here is a lesson for everyone in team sport: fitting in is not the prime virtue in life.

How Ferguson struck jackpot by backing former show pony

Another day, another masterpiece from Cristiano Ronaldo. His back-heeled goal against Aston Villa sums up his season, and it offends nature. He should't even be trying such tricks in professional football, still less scoring with them. Of all things one can find in one's heart to resent in Sir Alex Ferguson, his manager at Manchester United, this is possibly the worst.

How did he know that this obnoxious little show pony, this water-fly, this triumph of style over substance was in fact nothing of the kind? How could he see through the preening little squirt and realise that beneath was a footballer of genius, a man to dictate rather than decorate football matches?

When Ferguson brought him in as a replacement for St David Beckham, it was obvious that this was a classic error, a manager dazzled by a talent that was frail, ephemeral and insubstantial. But Ronaldo is nothing of the kind. It's unforgivable.

Nowhere to hide as Boat Race losers are left singing the blues

The Boat Race retains its extraordinary global appeal because of its cruelty. It is not the package of British eccentricity and pageantry and amateurism that does it, it is the absolute awfulness of the losing crew. It is impossible to say which event in world sport is the best to win, but I'm pretty certain that the Boat Race is the worst to lose.

Saturday's event was a classic: Cambridge trailing, fighting back inspiringly to take an important lead, and then losing. After that comes the worst bit - the fight isn't stopped. The loser must continue taking punishment. The race is well and truly over, but the procession of pain must continue.

And then the end. It's bad enough for the winners. The suffering of the smiling crew is terrible, but for the losers it really is the most naked agony in sport. Hard and bitter agony, and all for nothing. They must feel as if they had wasted their entire lives.

* Every now and then life brings us an event so perfectly capable of encapsulating so many things that it becomes almost a work of art. John Terry's Bentley is such a thing.

A man who is one of the highest paid athletes in the land parking his posh car in a space reserved for the disabled. While Robert Crampton, my colleague, made some excellent points about the fundamental immorailty of this act, the symbolic aspect of the story also matters. The archetype of the rich, arrogant, stuff-the-lot-of-you (even if you can't walk) footballer has been summed up for all time.

A though for Terry and his kind: people hate you nearly as much as estate agents and journalists