Anniversary year

If you thought you’d got away with one ruddy World Cup in 2006, then brace yourself: there are two of them in 2007, so obviously a double helping of the baloney which accompanies them. Cricket’s World Cup is staged in the Caribbean through March and April; rugby’s in France in September and October. Anniversaries to celebrate, too, and with a nice aptness. I fancy you can easily make a centenary case for 1907 being the year in which genuine international sport became a reality: for the first time an overseas competitor (Aussie leftie Norman Brookes) won the men’s title at Wimbledon, and another, French golfer Arnaud Massy, was first to win the Open and — nothing new under celebrity suns — he promptly named his newborn son Hoylake after the Lancashire links over which he’d so triumphantly trod. The first custom-built motor race track was opened to allcomers at Brooklands in Surrey; London’s Olympia staged the inaugural All-Nations’ Horse of the Year Show; South Africa, the first non-Aussie visitors, played a Test at Lord’s; and at Epsom an Irish-trained horse, Orby, won the Derby for the first time.