Badminton is the home of the brave

If you are looking for the most skilful and courageous people in sport, don’t waste your time on boxers and rugby players. Rather, concentrate your mind on the utterly unbelievable women — and men — who take part in three-day eventing at the highest level, for nothing in sport requires more cold nerve than riding round the cross-country course at Badminton.

The jumping days of the event take place over the weekend and the winner will know what it really means to risk everything. To throw your heart over a fence and hope the horse will catch it on the other side is the biggest leap of faith an athlete could be asked to make and, here, the horse is on his own, without the thrill of the herd to carry him over.

Badminton is the most beautiful and the most dramatic event on the sporting calendar. It features the tightest team that sport can create, that of horse and rider, a team that crosses the boundaries of nationality, race, religion and species. Colonel Frank Weldon, the former course designer at Badminton, was once asked what he considered the right preparation for the cross-country phase. “About half a bottle of champagne.”

Rivals ready to push Button in Barcelona

Formula One moves into its heartland this weekend. It is back in Europe that the real business of the season is done, whether you are talking about driving performances or intrigue. After the most extraordinary preliminaries in the sport in years, we can now see what happens as everything gets real in Barcelona.

As the petrolheads are taken up by such compelling issues as whether or not Ferrari will have a diffuser, and whether or not it will make any difference, the rest of us are inclined to ask the more human-orientated question — and Formula One has so far failed in its attempt to rule out the human factor entirely — of how the extraordinary Jenson Button will cope with the growing intensity of the season and more sustained challenges to his utterly unaccustomed position on top of the heap.

The rest of the grid is in a “joke’s over, let’s get serious” kind of mood, but how are things with Button? He is enjoying life at a sharp end of the grid, but we all know that the top drivers in Formula One are not there just because they can drive like the wind. They are there because they can drive like the wind when it really, really matters. We shall soon see if Button is one of their number.

United in a lost cause in North London

A sad tale is best for spring. The football season moves into its cruellest month with a woeful diminuendo. It’s sad at the top of the Barclays Premier League for all but one club and all that remains to learn is the identity of the first loser. That will become at least a little clearer when Arsenal take on Chelsea tomorrow afternoon in the the battle of the second-raters.

All seasons begin with such high hopes and all seasons end badly, for every club but one. That is what sport means, after all. Back in August it was clear that Manchester United would be toppled and Sir Alex Ferguson would finally lose it, but the chasers have once again failed to catch.

Not good enough: that is the only conclusion you can reach. Never mind refereeing decisions and managerial shifts and financial differentials, when the trees came into blossom, Arsenal and Chelsea failed. All that remains is to administer last rites for another season of nearly but not quite.