Three more perfect presents
THREE more outstanding books are featured this week, which any sports fan would be delighted to receive for Christmas:
Duncan Hamilton’s One Long and Beautiful Summer, a short elegy for red-ball cricket, confirms that in its purest form, cricket is a sport not to be rushed. Hamilton relishes preparing for a game, packing his radio, notebook, binoculars and newspaper, insisting on arriving “so early that a stillness is in the air”.
The author bears comparison with Neville Cardus, who asserted that “there can be no summer in this land without cricket,” an observation which effectively inspired Hamilton to plan the matches he would see throughout 2019. Drawing inspiration from JB Priestly, Hamilton writes: “You know a man best by the sort of Utopia in which he desires to live. My Utopia – on the cricket field at least – is watching a leg-spinner.”
Clearly not a man to be hurried, he scorns ‘modernity’ which, he assets, “comes at you at such a fast lick. You’re in the day after tomorrow almost before you realise yesterday has gone.” Brilliant.
Kenny Pryde’s The Medal Factory, is a compelling tale, tracing cycling’s seemingly inexorable rise and its dramatic fall from grace.
Cycling, he maintains, went from being a “derided sporting irrelevance” to “knighthoods and cereal box endorsements” as it careered towards centre stage in British sporting culture.
In spite of the success, however, “by 2016, British cycling ended up staring into the abyss, racked by self-doubt, excoriated in the media and criticised in Parliament… was there ever a sport so fulsomely praised before being brought to its knees as rapidly as British cycling?”
This is a fascinating read which highlights the growing importance of sports science across most sports and the characters who ensure the science is applied in the pursuit of success.
David Walsh’s latest book, The Russian Affair, deals with statesponsored drug abuse.
The main protagonists, Vitaly Stephanov and Yuliya Rusanova, present Walsh with such a volume of evidence that he is compelled to write it.
Stephanov and Rusanova met on a date in Moscow: he worked for Russia’s anti-doping agency, Rusada; Rusanova, meanwhile, was a promising 800m runner who revealed that she wasn’t the only Russian engaged in systematic doping – the whole national athletics team was at it. The man at the heart of this deception was Dr Grigory Rodchenkov, a longtime director of an institution known officially as the Moscow Anti-Doping Centre.
Underpinned by an unlikely love story, several scenes wouldn’t be out of place in a tense spy thriller as the pair assemble mountains of incriminating evidence. They eventually left Russia to live in exile under assumed names in the United States, hoping, no doubt, they’re far enough out of Russia’s revengeful reach.