Archives for June 2011

At the pinnacle of sport, spectators can become punch-drunk on impossibility.

Take the fabulously mis-named "serve". Some six foot five inch machine is winding up to hurl a missile at twice the national speed limit several yards beyond his opponent's arm-span. The receiver doesn't just manage to fling himself, goalie style, in the right direction. He gets his racquet to it. And somehow manages to block the ball back. He then scrambles up the cliff face so that he can continue to rally on something like level ground.

So much, so stupefying.

What we should be grateful for, is that Andy Murray gives you a sense of the effort -the unfair, unending amount of effort.

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Google - that friend of the deskbound journalist - suggests there are 166,000 electronic entries for "Sebastian Coe" and "sorry".

This doesn't mean that our Lord of the Olympics is a serial apologiser. In the top ten is an article he penned for The Daily Telegraph, last year, extolling the easy thrill of running: "I always felt sorry for swimmers, confronted by thousands of metres of grouting each week."

But the question of the moment is whether that list of results (which Google accomplished in a Bolt-esque 0.06 seconds) should be added to.

Now that my wife, or I (but I hope my wife) will be booting up the computer at 0555 BST next Friday, to apply for the next tranche of tickets, is it Lord Coe's fault that one of us will be knackered and in a filthy mood for the rest of the day?

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