The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Driven to the edge of human endurance
From a 621-mile horse race to a run up the Rockies – epic slogs make the best sporting tales, finds Martin Chilton
Sport can be a dazzling showcase for artistry, but sometimes it’s more about the slog. Three of the year’s best sports books have a common theme: testing the limits of endurance in pursuit of one’s dreams.
In Rough Magic (Ebury, £16.99) rider Lara Prior-Palmer recounts her quest to win the Mongol Derby – a 621-mile horse race across the Mongolian plains. Prior-Palmer kept going for seven days, through exhausting heat, as she overcame sickness, dehydration and falls to become the first woman to win the race – and, at 19, the youngest champion, too. “Being on a horse pulls you out of yourself and grounds you in the larger land,” says this modern conqueror.
In The Rise of the Ultra Runners (Faber, £14.99) Adharanand Finn explores a world where hallucinations are normal and pain is to be relished. The book, subtitled “a journey to the edge of human endurance”, covers Finn’s run from the deserts of Oman to the freezing Rockies.
Riding up juddering cobbled inclines is clearly an endurance test for even the fittest limbs. In The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman (Bloomsbury, £18.99), Belgophile Harry Pearson offers a witty, engaging guide to the spring bike races in Flanders. Pearson writes amusingly about the weather, the spectators and the cyclists – including Gerrit “The Pedalling Fool” Schulte – and he covers a lot of quirky historical ground in his “bone-shaking tour”.
This year brought the usual plethora of formulaic football memoirs from retired players – including Emile Heskey, Michael Owen and Trevor Francis – and a few books from current stars, such as Liverpool’s James Milner. But not many Premier League players can rival the cultural hinterland of Spaniard Juan Mata. In Suddenly a Footballer: My Story (Reach
Sport, £20), Mata reveals that at Chelsea he learnt to speak better English by watching Mad Men, and that his favourite London nightspot was Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho. Although Mata is a fan of Haruki Murakami, Ernest Hemingway and Charles Bukowski, his book cries out for more character exploration – how grumpy was Jose Mourinho? Instead, the most edgy anecdote here is that former Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal took against players who wore hats.
One of the most important football books of the modern era is Position of Trust (Coronet, £17.99) by Andy Woodward, a harrowing exposé of sexual abuse in youth set-ups. Crewe Alexandra player Woodward, who was repeatedly raped by the now-jailed coach Barry Bennell, has written a painfully honest memoir and his revelations prompted hundreds of other victims to come forward. One can only hope that football’s notoriously evasive governing bodies realise they have to end the “bullying, macho, secretive and controlling culture” that fostered such predatory behaviour.
If you suspected that the cricket dressing room was free of mean banter, you were mistaken. In Alastair Cook: The Autobiography (Michael Joseph, £20), the former England captain reveals that he was “schooled with brutal humour”, adding “to this day I’m known as Woggle, because of my slightly wonky left eye.” He also deals candidly with his “draining” bust-up with Kevin Pietersen. The public fallout left Cook feeling “isolated and persecuted”.
It has been a strong year for books on boxing. Donald McRae’s In Sunshine or in Shadow (Simon & Schuster, £20) is a superb tale set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. At its centre is trainer Gerry Storey, who ignored threats to his life as he taught fighters from both Republican and Loyalist backgrounds. His inspirational story celebrates peace and reconciliation.
Jane Couch showed plenty of courage as she took on boxing’s male establishment in her battle to fight professionally. Her gritty story The Final Round (Pitch, £19.99) counts the cost of being a trailblazer. “My biggest regret is that I didn’t see what a degrading and soul-destroying place the boxing world was
Boxer Joe Louis was told never to have his photograph taken with a white woman