A sports book landed on my desk, not a rare event. I started reading it, though, which is rather less common. It has the title Better Than Sex, you see. It is the ghosted autobiography of the jump - surely the mot juste - jockey Mick Fitzgerald and it's a good read.

But you'll be wanting to know about sex. In 1996 Fitzgerald won the Grand National on Rough Quest. Des Lynam, presenting the BBC coverage in those days, asked him: “Mick Fitzgerald, you've just won the Grand National. How does it feel?” “I've never enjoyed 12 minutes as much before in my life. After that, Des, you know, even sex is an anticlimax.”

Well, riding a horse tremendously fast over a series of terrifying jumps is really rather good, even if you only did it at local show level like me. But better than sex?

I was taken back to Barcelona and the Olympic Games of 1992. Ian Stark was riding for Great Britain in the three-day event. His horse was Murphy Himself, a horse Stark described as “a nutty professor with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger”. Their flamboyant round had included a breathtaking passage over the most fearsome complex on the course. He, too, was asked how it felt. “There's no better feeling in the world. Except maybe sex.” He said afterwards: “Don't print that, will you?” But like Don Giovanni, we betrayed him and moved on to our next victim.

But the question remains: is it the point that high achievement in sport is better (maybe) than sex? Or is it the point that sport in some way is like sex?

Riding horses is not sexually arousing, let's be quite clear about that. But riding at speed over jumps does involve such things as the merging of two bodies and minds, a series of thrilling and dramatic movements, and finally the release - of a kind - that comes in victory, or even in mere completion of a good round.

It also involves rhythm. “You don't have much time between fences to adjust anything, so when your horse is in a rhythm you just let him flow. It's like the sound you get when you're in a train carriage: de-de-de-dum, de-de-de-dum, de-de-de-dum. Stride-stride-jump, stride-stride-jump, stride-stride-jump.” That's Fitzgerald again, and that's how it was even for me, sometimes.

But other sports and other sportsmen - I can't recall any women athletes talking about sport in terms of sex - also bring sex into the business. “When I was a kid the only thing I shared my bed with was a football,” George Best said. “I know it sounds daft, but I used to love the feel of it. I used to hold it and look at it and think, ‘One day you'll do everything I tell you.'”

Later, Best used to get sexually aroused before football matches, and not necessarily because he was up to no good. When he was young, the excitement was because of the football itself. Best talks about this quite frankly in his book with Michael Parkinson, not worrying about this curious bit of crossed wiring, merely accepting it as one of the things that made him unusual.

Other footballers have talked about sex and the game. Paul Gascoigne compared scoring a goal to sexual release, making it sound a rather lonely pleasure, but no less acute for that. Some men refer to sexual conquest as “scoring”, which reverses the metaphor. But then sport is supposed to be a metaphor; sex is not metaphorical, at least, not in my experience.

Ronaldo, the Brazil striker, said that winning the World Cup was better than sex; so perhaps for him sex is a metaphor. “Both are very hard to stay without and I'm sure sex wouldn't be as rewarding as this World Cup,” he said. “It's not that sex isn't good” - thanks for clarifying that point - “but the World Cup is every four years and sex is not.” Ronaldo, moving effortlessly into too-much-detail mode, added: “I'm going to have sex in a few moments.”

Kevin Pietersen, the England cricket captain, shares Ronaldo's views. It begins to strike me that this notion - that sporting success is better merely because it is rare, while sexual pleasure is less good because it is more frequent - is a false argument. Pietersen, who is married to Jessica Taylor, a singer with something called Liberty X, said that scoring a century for England is better than sex. He added: “Centuries don't come round very often, but sex is on tap, isn't it?” Well, I suppose that's so - unless you require a partner, that is. In fact, the not-requiring-a-partner bit does come close to the way that some sportsmen see the world.

Geoffrey Boycott was another great sleeper with sporting equipment. He used to go to bed with his cricket bat and he said, without any sense of twinkling irony: “Given the choice between Raquel Welch and a hundred at Lord's, I'd take the hundred every time.” He didn't say anything about Trent Bridge, though.

Boycott, through inadequate research, once found himself doing In The Psychiatrist's Chair with Anthony Clare; he apparently thought that Clare would be letting him publicise his latest book. Clare got more from him than the “on sale in all good bookshops” stuff. With effortless charm, he bored into Boycott's defence until he hit a wall of total incomprehension.

“I wanted to be the best batsman in the world, and I were the best batsman in the world,” Boycott said. “How can you talk about missing anything?” Well, Geoff, if you don't know, I can't tell you. But then perhaps that's true of many, if not all, ultra-high achievers, in sport and, no doubt, in a million other areas of life. It comes down to a radically different set of priorities.

But there is, clearly, some kind of overlap, some kind of confusion, between sex and the ultimate achievements in sport. It comes, if you'll permit this locution, from the physical intensity of sport and the release that occurs when a long-cherished goal has been achieved; or, for that matter, scored.

Sigmund Freud was of the opinion that sport, like many other things, existed mainly as a sublimation of the sexual drive, but if it were no more than that, great moments in sport would only be nearly as good as sex. What many great sportsmen say is that sport can be more fulfilling than sex.

One thing is clear here and that is that when it is compared to sport, the sex in question is an impersonal matter. No one has suggested that sport is better, or even comparable, to making love with your wife, to the act of procreation. No: sport is compared more to conquest, to the winning of and sexual release within an unnamed partner.

These are occasions when sex itself is something of a sport. It is not necessarily a competition with other men, but certainly there is some kind of mountain-climbing (and peak-counting) element to it. No one with the possible exception of Boycott has suggested that sport is better than love ... even if that's what many great sportsmen privately believe.

Certainly, great sport is one of the most vivid experiences that life has to offer in peaceful times. But I'll leave the last word with Steve Davis: “It's perfectly OK to talk during sex - so long as it's about snooker.”

Better Than Sex, by Mick Fitzgerald, with Donn McClean, published by Racing Post.