She wept. She wept salt tears, and I could feel tears of my own prickle at the back of my eyes. All around me, I could see tough, hard hacks making casual little touches to the face — scratches, rubs, adjustments of spectacles — all moves designed to disguise the welling-up of tears.

Tell me, dear one, who died? It was I, Paula, who died. Me, the late Paula Radcliffe. This was a funeral at which the chief mourner and the deceased were the same person. She wept on television, and then she wept anew at the press conference, and all the while she was treated like a mother whose child had died: hushed, gentle voices, elaborate consideration, gentle gestures, pats on forearm, kind pressure on small of back.

It was as if Radcliffe believed that love would never again be hers, that only by means of victory could she deserve love. Much later, in her autobiography, she told the tale of her agony in the gutters of Papagou, and her rescue by friends who offered to contact her husband and coach, Gary Lough. Not that, she said. Anything but that. Some marriages are very curious arrangements, and certainly every marriage is a unique, incomprehensible civilisation, virtually impenetrable even to the most educated observer, sociologist, anthropologist, archaeologist. And it was for herself she was weeping; she made that quite plain: “No one was hurting inside like I was.”

She deserved the pain, the misery, the anxiety. She brought it on herself. I would not wish such pain on her; I sympathised, to the point of clenched-fist, not-weeping, not-me, eye-rubbing, with her sadness, her sense, not so much of defeat, but of loss, of bereavement. But she had deserved it all right: just as she deserved all the glory and praise for her queenly achievements in commercial marathons.

All the sacrifice! Sacrifice for what? If you sacrifice something for yourself, it is not really sacrifice, is it? I remember my wife asking me how some book or other was going. I replied, misquoting the God-struck church-cleaner in The Commitments: “A lot of hard work. If you didn’t do it for yourself, who would you do it for?”

Sport is a juggernaut. A huge vehicle with monstrous wheels, bearing a deity, rumbling its way across the world, perpetually surrounded by a seething mob of fervent worshippers. Frequently, the worshippers stumble, and are crushed between the pitiless wheels of the car. Sad enough: but the fallers are willing victims even if they didn’t seek that end. It was their adoration of the idol that made them vulnerable. And sport rumbles onward, the crushing of a victim failing to alter its course by as much as a centimetre.

Radcliffe has known disappointment. She has known triumph also; and in sport, all triumph is built on the disappointment of others. She had inflicted vast disappointment — vast pain — in her time. Now sport decreed that it was her turn. Sport is not only cruel. Sport is also dangerous. The more you devote yourself to the idol in the car, the more dangerous it is.





At the Olympic Games, the two things that worry you most are the nature of your cell and the efficiency of the transport. When I arrived in Athens for the Games of 2004, it took three hours to get from the airport to the media village; not a good sign, especially as my cell wasn’t in the media village. It was in something called Iaso. I was by no means sanguine about this. In Sydney we had stayed at a hotel that served me a fat boiled egg and Vegemite toast for breakfast, and it had had a nice little bar on the top floor where I could drink Cascade beer at the end of the day. And now here, in Athens, I had a great desire, not for luxury, but for comfort.

I was dropped somewhere distinctly unpromising: a maternity hospital. I asked a couple of people where to go: no one knew. It would have been a great help had I known then that Iaso was a daughter of Ascelpius, the Greek god of medicine. After half an hour — very amusing it is, walking round and round the same place with the temperature in the high eighties while carrying two bags, one full of laptop and the other full of clean shirts and modern Greek literature, all the time having no idea whatsoever where you are going, and finding no one at all with any idea about anything to do with what you are trying to do — I found out where to go — which was, yes, the maternity hospital.

Please don’t think I exaggerate for effect. It was not a former maternity hospital. It was not going to be a maternity hospital as soon as the Olympic Games had finished. It was a working maternity hospital: a lobby filled with gravid women, while outside its doors men desperately sucked life from cigarettes and the floor was crossed and recrossed by doctors strutting about like film stars. I had already been in twice and given up, as this obviously was the Wrong Place.

But it wasn’t. Around a couple of turns of corridor, there was a nice Greek student dressed as a Games volunteer, and, after various complications, we established that, against all logic — this in the country that invented logic — I had a cell on the upper floor. I was shown around by a concierge lady in a lemon-yellow nursey uniform.

It was a cell of very decent size, with a viciously shiny floor that was to lay me out a couple of days later. There was a panic button in the shower, handles for levering myself on and off the bog, and the bed was high off the ground and on wheels. The only concession they had made to its non-maternal use was to take away the stirrups. The window was large and looked out over the Olympic complex. I could see swift: good start. There was no desk, but the phone went almost immediately and I was asked to write 1,500 words on why the Olympics are sexy.



It was somehow reassuring to learn that the ancient story was still doing the rounds; reassuring to know the contempt in which I am held by my colleagues. A youngish fellow was heard asking if it was really true that I had been to a world heavyweight fight and hidden under a desk throughout.

It is not. My objection to boxing is based on philosophical rather than squeamish grounds. But the untrue story sticks with me: it seems to possess a truth that no amount of fact can destroy. That sort of thing is true of many genuinely famous people, especially in sport. Fred Trueman, the great England fast bowler, was supposed, while touring the sub-continent, to have told an Indian prince: “Pass us t’mustard, Gunga Din.” His denials only created new myths: “It were t’bloody salt I were after.”

So in one sense I can never deny the story. Morally, if not actually, I watched Mike Tyson beat the bejasus out of Larry Holmes at Atlantic City in 1988 from beneath the desk. I accept that. No one wishes to listen to a rational destruction of a thing he loves: and many people in my profession love boxing.

Should I spoil the story with facts? Of course I should. So there I was in Atlantic City — white and reeling from a monstrous hallucinating flu which required me, that night and for two following nights, to remove the soaked sheets from my bed halfway towards morning. I was feeling pretty ghastly at the fight, but I reported it with competence. That required me to watch the savagery. I am not proud of doing so: nor apologetic.

My witty friend and colleague Roy Collins remarked, mischievously, after I had staggered off to bed, that I had watched the fight from beneath the desk. It was a joke: a sharp but affectionate one. But it was a joke that certain people needed to believe in.

Sport is a metaphor. Football and rugby are cod battles: tennis is a cod duel. Running races are about predator and prey. Cricket is a complex metaphor about life and death. Horseracing is a paradigm of evolution: only the fastest get to breed, get to become ancestors. That is the point of sport: it is pretend. Sport can be fast and dangerous and painful. People talk about killing the opposition off, the killer instinct, striking the death blow, but no one dies.

Boxing is not a metaphor. Boxing is a death duel. The weapons are fists, padded so that a man can punch without breaking his hands. That makes these weapons potentially lethal, because the main target is the head. The point of hitting someone in the head is to cause damage to his brain.

Fact: all brain damage is permanent. In short, the idea of boxing is to cause more permanent brain damage in your opponent than you yourself sustain. If it is cowardly to state that you believe that this is not a suitable entertainment for civilised people, then I am happy to be a coward.

Look, sport without risk is a bloody mary without Tabasco, and without the bloody vodka as well. People get injured in the horsey sports all the time — yes, and killed, too — but I don’t want to see the horsey sports banned.

I want to see boxing banned. All right, it is perhaps acceptable for two men to agree to try to cause each other brain damage. But that doesn’t make it acceptable to watch; still less to profit from people watching.

And there in Athens, quite by accident, I found myself at a table of boxing-lovers getting all Paula-eyed on vinous sentimentality about Amir Khan. It was not an evening in which I could play much of a role, but, inevitably, a few days on, I found myself asked to cover Khan’s quarterfinal bout. Your brain is the texture of lightly cooked scrambled egg: when it hits the inside of your skull, it gets scrambled a bit more. Woody Allen said of the brain: “It’s my second favourite organ.” (I once quoted that line to a woman I deeply admired. She responded icily: “It’s my favourite.”) But that is by the by. I watched Khan, 17, defeat Baik Jong Sub of South Korea in 93 seconds. It was brilliant, I accept that, and wrote as much. But it was not a metaphor.





I was there for the final race: the one when Steve Redgrave and the coxless four won the gold medal, and Redgrave collected his fifth gold at his fifth Olympics. I remember the dreadful shaft of pain I felt when I was convinced that the Italians had beaten them to the line, the incomprehension I felt at the eruption of British cheers, and the extraordinary joy when I realised my error.

Redgrave is not only a person. He is also a quality. You look for someone who might achieve great things in sport. Napoleon would ask of his generals: “Has he luck?” I ask of athletes: “Has he Redgrave?” Redgrave is the ability to go beyond yourself. It is the ability to go the full distance and more. It is the ability to commit yourself, day after day, to the one goal of winning.

It was a strange thing, Steve Redgrave’s press conference after he won that fifth gold medal. Like the rest of us, I rather wanted to give Redgrave a hearty round of applause when he walked in. But we journalists are diffident about applause, and no one gave the lead, which would surely have been followed. So it began in the usual way: “Questions for the gold medal-winning crew?”

After the ritual was completed, Redgrave half got up. He then bent to the microphone and said a strange thing. “Thanks for making it all worthwhile.” And that broke the dam. We gave him a storm of applause, and clapped him every step of the way out of the tent.

In the middle of the applause we all did a rather belated double-take. Surely, that wasn’t thank you, as in thank you. That was thank you, as in piss off. It was a bitter, and rather gracelessly timed remark, one that was intended to shame all those who had doubted him, all those who had dared to suggest, in the troubled months that preceded the race, that this final victory was a miracle too far. So, rather than bask in glory, he chose to leave his sport in an atmosphere of bitter confrontation. It was rather pleasant that we threw it back at him in genuine warmth and admiration. But it was an instructive moment. Even Redgrave, garlanded with praise more than most athletes could ever dream of, could not bear to finish his sporting career without expressing his contempt for those who had chronicled it so admiringly.

Clive Woodward, when head coach of the England rugby team, once told the assembled journos at a press conference: “I have the greatest respect for what you do.” The response was an instant, instinctive belly-laugh, as spontaneous as the Redgrave round of applause. It’s like mice saying that they have the greatest respect for cats, or stomachs speaking of their admiration for nematode worms.

But not because they are prey and we are predators; or that they are hosts and we are parasites. It is because we are completely different life-forms. We look for different things in life. We define our lives in different ways. There is almost no common ground at all. We certainly don’t have sport in common. For the two groups, sport is a very different thing. Sport is our subject; sport is their object.

Our lives are led in the knowledge that the people we write about despise us and what we do. Eunuchs in the harem. That’s how athletes see writers; no doubt about that — people who would do it if they could, but they can’t. So we write as a second-best. No doubt the hunters in the Matopos Hills thought the same of the people who recorded their hunts so beautifully on the rock wall, and it is the paintings that remain.

© Simon Barnes 2006. Extracted from The Meaning of Sport, to be published by Short Books on October 4 at £16.99.

WHY DOES SPORT HOLD US IN SUCH THRALL?
Readers can join Simon Barnes as he discusses his brilliant new book, The Meaning of Sport, with celebrated Times writers Lynne Truss and Sir Matthew Pinsent, on October 31 at 6.30pm at the Hong Kong Theatre in Aldwych, London

Tickets available from: www.foyles.co.uk or by calling 0870 4202777

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