This week’s roundup also features France v Wales classics, rabona goals and March Madness1) Sabine Schmitz, the “Queen of the Nürnburgring”, has died at the age of 51. Schmitz is the only woman to win the German track’s 24 Hours race, in 1996 and again in 1997 – you can see some highlights here and a tribute from the track (in German) here. Schmitz went on to join the Top Gear team, memorably racing round her favourite circuit in a Transit van and a Volkswagen Golf GTI, and also putting some vintage vehicles to the test on Fifth Gear. Here she is doing what she did best: tearing through the field with jaw-dropping precision in this exceptional on-board video."There has...
Brooding middleweight’s brilliant career was frequently fuelled by indignities and insults, both perceived and realFor the duration of his time at the front of the American sporting consciousness, Marvin Hagler was perceived as someone fighting with chips on both shoulders. This, after all, was a man who was so offended at the refusal of his request to be introduced by his nickname of “Marvelous” that he changed his name by court order.Hagler, who died on Saturday at his New Hampshire home at the age of 66, has been remembered as not only one of the greatest prizefighters in the storied history of boxing’s middleweight division but one its finest at any weight in any era. The undisputed champion at 160lb...
The journey began in NSW and, after 50 sun-dappled summers in this business, it’s been a hell of a rideJournalists of a certain era tend to embrace the perpendicular pronoun with all the enthusiasm of Scrooge hugging Tiny Tim. “I” might be the skinniest word but it punches its weight in vanity. Hugh McIlvanney famously would perform linguistic gymnastics in his perfectly crafted sentences so as to refer to himself as “this reporter”, thus diluting any suggestion it was the great man himself at the centre of the story – even though it often was.He understood the pleasant fact that we are regularly hurled into the orbit of the famous. It can be a perilous place, where the trick is...
After a week of trauma from boxing ring to football pitch we must remember there is value in the extreme things people doIf you haven’t seen the new TV advert for Jacamo clothing I highly recommend doing so. It’s an exhilarating thing. First up we see the Jacamo models: stern, powerful men dressed in comfortable nylon leisurewear. These pictures are cut with a reel of stirring images. Rutting stags. A priapic wind tower. A spurting volcano. A craning lighthouse drenched in surf. Stallion power! Jackets! Massiveness! Rain, wind and fire!This kind of imagery should not be taken lightly. The Jacamo advert is so exciting that just catching a glimpse of it – perhaps during a break in the Sri Lankan...
Daniel Dubois broke The Code but so did some of the hardest men ever, including Roberto Duran and Mike Tyson When Daniel Dubois quit in the 10th round against Joe Joyce, the young heavyweight with the kind face and a good heart was hurled into a pit of shame alongside some of the hardest men in the history of boxing, Roberto Duran and Mike Tyson among them.The public court of social media – the modern equivalent of Robespierre’s revolutionary tribunal – pronounced that Dubois had committed the fight game’s unforgivable sin. The panel, surprisingly to some, included members of his own tribe: Dillian Whyte, David Haye, Johnny Nelson, Carl Frampton and others familiar with the reality of the ring. He...