Sport

You don’t need to be a genius to know that if you are training for HM The King and HM The Queen, then it would be a shrewd career move to land a Royal Ascot winner for them later this month. This is, of course, the first time that the King and Queen will be having runners at the famous meeting under their new titles. Their trainers know that if they can engineer a winner for the royal duo at Ascot’s five-day event, it will generate hugely positive headlines all over the news and sports pages. I think the King and Queen have at least two first-rate chances of a

It’s unnerving being surrounded by a crowd in the woods. You can hear people but only glimpse their limbs or faces through the leaves. It triggers something primordial, similar to the feeling of being watched. Ideally, someone with a big strimmer would have given Cooper’s Hill a good going over before the cheese rolling. But cheese rollers don’t concern themselves with ideals.  My friends were shocked by the brutal pitch of the hill. Could someone really hurl themselves down that? On the last Monday of May, and for reasons lost to time, a wheel of Double Gloucester is thrown down the hill and a group of runners throw themselves after

Peloton has peaked and troughed, wild swimming has made its splash – and now, it seems, it’s padel’s turn for the prime spot. Said to be the world’s fastest-growing racket sport, the game – a hybrid of tennis and squash, with a dash of ping pong – is fun and sociable (it’s played in doubles) and has been adopted by around 25 million people worldwide. Easy to get good at quite quickly, it’s also apparently the ‘new golf’ among retired footballers – David Beckham is a fan.  ‘Padel has become an obsession in the shires… a padel court is the latest must-have in country houses’ Across the UK, any sports

Fans of long-form sport, rejoice. April is here, and it is our month. Not only does it see the first four-day matches of the county cricket season, it’s also when snooker stages its world championship. Long-form sport is always the best. A four-day cricket match (five for Tests) has way more scope for drama than a T20. And the snooker at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, where even the shortest match is the best of 19 frames, gives space for the twists and turns that characterise true sporting excitement. Both games have sought to recruit new fans in recent years by offering shortened versions. Cricket has gone from 50-over games

Don’t ever ask a Sámi person how many reindeer he owns. It’s about as polite as asking someone in Britain how much cash he’s got in the bank. But enquire after the health of his reindeer, or which are the ‘stand-out’ specimens in his herd of between 300 and 1,000, and you will be fine. In fact, get ready for a detailed response from someone whose Arctic community often still lives symbiotically with its animals.  Racing reindeer has been popular among Sámi people for hundreds of years, but began receiving wider attention in 2005, when the Midnight Sun Marathon organisers and the Sámi Valáštallan Lihttu sporting body arranged the first championships to be run in Tromsø in Norway.

On a cold Tuesday night, as the wind whipped in from the North Sea, I joined 220 hardy souls to watch a game of football. Less than a mile away from the Sizewell nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast but light years away from the lurid lights of the Premiership, Leiston FC were playing Ilkeston Town in the Pitching In Southern League – Premier Division Central. As the old joke goes, the attendance was so small it would have been easier to name the crowd changes than the team changes. Welcome to non-league football – in this case the seventh tier of the game’s pyramid system of promotion and relegation.

If you are ever at one of those dinner parties where the company is competing to slag off the iniquities of the British Empire, counter with the two words: ‘Corfu’ and ‘cricket’. Although never an actual colony (but rather a British protectorate), Corfu and the Corfiots are that rare thing – unashamedly Anglophile. There are several good reasons for this, not least including the British creation of the island’s celebrated university and Corfu town’s water and sewerage system. But for some, the protectorate’s greatest gift was cricket. This year Corfu will be celebrating the bicentenary of the coming of the game to the jewel of the Ionian Sea – making

I am not naturally a spontaneous person. I relish neatly laying out projects and plans in my Moleskine diary. It was out of character, then, when on the second Monday of the Wimbledon fortnight I decided on the spur of the moment to head to the All England Club and join the queue for a day ticket. If I didn’t get in, I reasoned, I could always have a nice meal in a nearby restaurant and watch the action on a big screen, content in the knowledge that I was at least sharing the air of the SW19 postcode. My back-up plan wasn’t needed. When I joined the ‘queue’, I

Stanley, Falkland Islands I’m not saying the Falklands is a tiny place, but last month, over the course of just a few hours, I had my hair cut by one international athlete and then my passport processed by another. Soon-to-be international athletes, anyway. They’re both part of the Islands’ team for this year’s Commonwealth Games, which is taking place in Birmingham this week. The Falklands has despatched 16 competitors across four sports: badminton, table tennis, cycling and bowls. For many participants, this is their first Commonwealth Games. For some, thanks largely to Covid, it will be their debut international appearance. The youngest, 15-year-old Ben Chater, has not only never competed internationally

Let civilisation fall apart if it must. I no longer care. The England men’s cricket team is suddenly playing with such swaggering magnificence that everything else – endless culture wars, inflation, even the threat of hypersonically delivered nuclear annihilation from Russia – pales into insignificance. I just want to watch my heroes – Ben Stokes, Joe Root and the rest – play the game I love like deities. If Putin is going to press the big red button then so be it. As the temperature rises to a million degrees celsius here in Putney, I will console myself that at least I witnessed Jonny Bairstow’s transcendentally perfect innings at Trent