Sport

Maria Sharapova topped the list for the world’s highest earning female athlete for 11 consecutive years. Not that she has ever been the world’s best female athlete. She isn’t even the best in her own sport. You measure tennis players by their grand-slam singles titles: Sharapova has five, Serena Williams 21. But Sharapova pulled off the win-double of the bimbo-champion, and that’s where the money is. Williams could win another hundred slams and still lag behind Sharapova as an earner, because she’s not even a bit blonde. Before Sharapova won Wimbledon at 17, Anna Kournikova had shown how it was done. Kournikova earned pots more than infinitely better players because

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/whysexmatters-thedeathofsportandistheeusinkingwhetherbrexithappensornot-/media.mp3″ title=”Simon Barnes and Alex Massie discuss the crisis in sport” startat=830] Listen [/audioplayer]Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe. But now, as we look forward to an Olympic year, a Wimbledon with hot British contenders in the men’s and the women’s competitions for the first time in

Like religion, sport can take any amount of passion in its stride. It’s indifference that’s the killer. Sport can be bubbling with incontinent hatred, poisonous rivalries, ludicrous injustice and the most appalling people doing the most appalling things: but as long as people still care, as long as the sporting arguments still echo, as long as newspapers are read from back to front, then sport’s future is safe. But now, as we look forward to an Olympic year, a Wimbledon with hot British contenders in the men’s and the women’s competitions for the first time in damn near 50 years, a summer with a thrilling England cricket team, an England

The world’s tennis elite is up in arms. Roger Federer wants to see proof, demanding that the people behind “allegations that match-fixing is rife” should name names.  Andy Murray has criticised the practice of betting companies sponsoring tournaments. And Murray’s former coach Mark Petchey thinks that betting on lower-grade tournaments should be outlawed – although it isn’t clear how he proposes to enforce that on syndicates in Hong Kong. They are all missing the point. Perhaps that’s because (or why) the entire media cohort did the same thing yesterday, running story after interview about the possibility that tennis matches get thrown for money. All the old clichés came out: how tennis (as a two-person

Just as one Muslim doesn’t represent Islam, Tyson Fury doesn’t represent boxing. But that hasn’t stopped liberal commentators and the morally-outraged Twitterati, who have used the BBC Sports Personality furore to attack the sport. Julie Bindel (who claims boxing is ‘not a sport but a sadistic spectacle performed by men’) wrote in the Guardian: ‘If your job is to knock somebody unconscious, it’s unlikely that they have been raised to think that solving an argument with their fists is wrong. The ethos behind this can also breed dangerous attitudes towards women.’ Does this mean a tennis player will try to solve an argument with a racket? Or a golfer with a club? Boxing

In 1981, when I was ten and Ian Botham was 26, I thought he was God. Now, the week after Botham turned 60, the 44-year-old me thinks he’s an arse. And that makes me sad. The world is a simple place when you’re ten. There are heroes and villains, victories and defeats. The very best victories are the ones that were nearly defeats. Headingley 1981, for example. No need for the details — you know them already, not just from the match itself but from the hundreds of documentaries made about it since. I still lap them all up like an addict, silently mouthing along as Richie Benaud describes Botham’s six

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3″ title=”Alex Massie and Michael Henderson discuss England’s victory against Australia” startat=1184] Listen [/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip. Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope. Thank God I was leaving: those poor buggers