There are people who will tell you that beauty and courage are the finest things in sport, and then turn away from an event that shows these qualities in their most remarkable form. Perhaps it offends the sensibilities of these observers — that courage of a quite dizzying kind can be found in women and little girls every bit as much as it can in footballers and boxers.

This weekend the World Gymnastics Championships holds its final two days, as the medals for the best on each individual piece of apparatus are handed out. This is not only my event of choice this weekend; I’ll be going to the O2 arena in southeast London to write about it (so there’s something to look forward to). It is London’s first real dress rehearsal for the Olympic Games.

And there is even some patriotic interest. Louis Smith is probably the best of them. Smith was the bronze medal-winner on the pommel horse at the Olympics in Beijing last year and he qualified serenely for the same event here. But, for me, the men’s high bar is the sport’s great unmissable.

Jenson Button keeping everyone in suspense
It’s like fumbling at the buttons of a lovely but reluctant lady’s blouse. Lord, trying to will Jenson Button into becoming the Formula One world champion is like trying to seduce a woman who, though she really likes you, is suffering from an attack of virtue. Every time you undo another button, you provoke another fit of vorrei e non vorrei.

Go on, Jenson, you know you want to. Well, I do — but then again I don’t. I really ought to, but perhaps I shouldn’t. Perhaps we could have a little talk. Or perhaps, you suggest, a little more champagne. Well, maybe. But only a sip. Perhaps we could remain just friends?

And so Button advances inch by inch, and button by button, eagerly yet reluctantly towards the great affair of his life. The once runaway leader has become the greatest tease in sport, but he will bring it all to a climax this weekend in Brazil with a podium finish. I bet he won’t, though. I bet he’ll take another mini-step — allow the exploring hand a fraction more licence — and then wait for the last race, in Abu Dhabi. And perhaps pay the price for his coyness.

Soap opera has turned into the ex-factor
Portsmouth Football Club have been giving us some fun this season. It’s as if their story had been specially constructed to highlight all the woes to which modern football is prone — of course, it couldn’t actually happen like this in real life, but we have put everything that can possibly go wrong into one story, like a parable, so you’ll understand it better.

Portsmouth are on their third owner of the season, unless there’s been another since I last looked. They’ve had to explain to staff and players that, awfully sorry, but those wages you expected to get, well, we haven’t actually got them. But don’t worry. We’ll get some more stuff from the money shop and football will continue.

So, to liven things up, they are playing host to Tottenham Hotspur, under Harry Redknapp, their former manager, who took with him a bunch of Portsmouth players, all of whom will be delighted to show their former club how far they’ve advanced. Portsmouth won the other week but I fear that they may have peaked too soon. Soon, we shall ask, like Caesar himself: “O, you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, knew you not Pompey?”