The best (and worst) of this year’s sport

It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and greediest men on the planet, wanting a massive extra bung to pitch up for the Ryder Cup and, equally noisome, Bill Sweeney, chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, paying himself £1.1 million while announcing a loss of £37.9 million. That salary included a performance-based one-off payment of £358,000. Performance? Well may you ask. As Francis Baron, a former RFU chief, observed sagely: ‘We are paying stellar salaries for junk-bond performances.’ Fair enough in my view, and that’s not even looking at the England rugby team’s less than stellar showing.

As in life, sporting highlights are counterbalanced by lowlights, sometimes on the same afternoon, in the same event. I’m thinking of a not particularly special Australia rugby XV beating England at Twickers (or do we now have to call it the Alliers?). It was almost certainly the highlight of the Wallabies’ year and the lowlight of England’s.

But enough of this carping. At the season of, er, goodwill, it’s time to mark out the great performances of 2024. It was the year of the Paris Olympics and the Euros in Germany, both wonderful spectacles and proof that big events work best in countries with a history of sport, that know what they are doing and are accessible to visitors. And if the Gulf states want to own sport, and sadly there’s no sign that they don’t, they need to produce competitors rather than just host events. Personally I loved the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris, sluiced by torrential downpours as Celine Dion stood on the side of the Eiffel Tower to belt out the real Piaf classic ‘Hymne à l’Amour’ (forget ‘Je ne regrette rien’) as if there was no tomorrow.