Allow me to present you this morning with an utterly gratuitous picture of female beauty. These few scant and sorry words are merely a transparent excuse for including it. Has there ever been anything in sport quite so lip-smackingly gorgeous as the backhand of Justine Henin?

This week she has made the decision to retire rather than win the French Open and I'm inclined to sulk and cancel my Eurostar ticket. I could never get over the wonder of Henin, and in particular the lyrical perfection of that backhand. It would have been wonderful enough in a great brute of a girl, but with Henin it defied belief and, with it, the rules of biomechanics and physics as well.

There was (and still is) nothing of her. So where did the power come from? How was it that she could not only outmanoeuvre but on occasions also out-hit Serena Williams? It could only be in the perfection of her timing, the coincidence of sweet spot, bounce, footwork and angle. She seemed to have no margin for error whatsoever; perfection simply had to be her first resort. That's how she won seven grand-slam titles.

Her retirement is a shock and yet not a shock. She carried an air of terrible sadness with her. Like Charlie Brown in Peanuts, she walked under a personal black cloud on the brightest of days. A family feud of extraordinary virulence ended just a year ago, but only because of a new sadness. A marriage broke up in bizarre circumstances. Serenity was also an inextricable part of her life; but only on court.

Her defection leaves the crasser type of marketing people hoping for a long and sustained rivalry between players more renowned for conventional comeliness: Maria Sharapova, of course, and perhaps Ana Ivanovic. Me, I think there is more beauty in Henin's backhand - cross-court or down the line, take your pick - than in a million photo-ops.

A great athlete of either sex has a genius for movement. It is in dynamism that you see them at their best and that's as true of Sharapova as it is of Henin. Sharapova's on-court movement is a glorious thing; her cat-walk pouting is commonplace, and there are plenty who do it better.

Henin, with her sparse frame and intimidating, boot-button eyes, never cared to play the diva. But in motion she was a beauty and she has given great joy to many of us.

I hope she will find the happiness that has so consistently eluded her in retirement, but if she changes her mind and comes back, I won't be trying to dissuade her.

Ferguson's key weapon revealed: fear

Avram Grant has put his finger on what must be Sir Alex Ferguson's greatest achievement as a manager. He said that Manchester United won the championship because the referees are on their side.

This may be sour grapes, but it is also fact. Time and again we see that fateful hesitation and the moment is gone, the penalty ungiven, the red card unshown.

But what do you expect? It is a matter of unconscious bias. You see - everybody sees, including referees - what you expect to see. That's how the brain processes information. The unexpected is baffling and requires an adjustment; in some circumstances, the adjustment comes too late.

You expect a champion to win, you expect the lesser team, the lesser player, to fail. It is in this way that most sports are subjectively judged, even though objectivity is the aim.

A tail-end batsman is more likely to get a bad leg-before decision than a star batsman because the umpire expects him to fail. In the same way, a referee expects United to win. It is instructive that Roger Federer hates Hawk-Eye technology in tennis. Without it, he would get more than the usual allocation of iffy calls.

Ferguson's genius has been to work and to extend that unconscious bias. He has done this by making a massive parade of every refereeing error and of many other decisions that went against him that weren't errors at all. As a result, he has added fear to the natural and inevitable unconscious bias that operates in his favour. Thus referees have that tiny reluctance to commit against United. It is something that experts in combat call stab-fright, or trigger-freeze. A moment's hesitation is all it takes.

Pain too much to bear with Paula Radcliffe

It is with dreadful inevitability that we learn that Paula Radcliffe, 13 weeks away from the Olympic Games, is on crutches. She has always seemed a creature driven by the furies, impelled to seek a wild and impossible perfection, but unable to bear the weight of training or expectation.

No one has made such a glorious transformation from perpetual fourth-placer to glowing champion-as-of-right. But I was there in Athens when it all went so badly wrong, and it wasn't decent to watch. It mattered too much, the despair was too deep and too genuine, and her response was more suitable to bereavement than to defeat in a sport.

She has since proved her taste not only for victory but also for battle in two compelling victories in the New York Marathon. But, naturally, it is the Olympics she wants above all and now she faces one of those classic Fights Against Injury of the kind we know so well: David Beckham, Wayne Rooney, Jonny Wilkinson, Andrew Flintoff, and on and on. I don't think I can bear it.

I adore Paula in triumph, but I really can't bear to be around Paula the martyr. Her lack of perspective is truly disturbing. We must always remember what Boris said: nobody died.

Hideous noise the abiding Cup Final memory

I would like to congratulate Wembley Stadium for the triumph of its public address system. It has finally got it so loud that it passes the threshold of pain by a considerable margin.

At the Cup Final, Wembley made sure that it would be imposing pain of the most severe kind by getting Lesley Garrett and Katherine Jenkins to sing Abide With Me. It was possibly the single worst musical performance I have heard; and it also hurt a good deal. Both were committed to the Three Vs method: vim, vibrato and volume. Their self-indulgent coloratura trills - on an austere hymn about death, please note - were magnified to a point some way beyond the sound of Concorde at take-off. It was a hideous experience. I jammed my fingers to my ears, but that could not remove the horrors of the occasion.

I was at one of the best concerts of my life on Friday and the soprano sang with a glorious, unaffected beauty. Football supporters' obscene chants are a thousand times more musical than Garrett's ineffable din.

Mike Atherton makes immediate impact

I am continually fascinated by the difference between top performers and the rest of us, and I had a small but absorbing lesson in the way it operates last week. At the Test match, I have been sitting next to this newspaper's new Chief Cricket Correspondent, Mike Atherton, who was once pretty good at the game himself. Shot! A more or less involuntary murmur of appreciation ubiquitous in cricketing circles. Me, I say it when the ball has beaten cover point and is creaming its way to the boundary. Atherton says it at the moment of impact.