Top-level athletes are, by definition, unusual but the very best will have an unlikely advantage over their siblingsWinners come second. Or third, even fourth. Just usually not first. I’m talking about birth order: where you fit into the run of your siblings. That’s the takeaway from Mind Games, a new book by Annie Vernon, best known at the Guardian and Observer for a short work placement she did here in 2015, though in the wider world she perhaps has greater fame as a world champion rower who won a silver medal at the 2008 Olympics.Mind Games sets out to unpick what it is about top‑level athletes that makes them different. For Vernon it’s mostly mental. “You have to be unbelievably,...
Tennis’s white-hot favourite collects Sports Personality of the Year award but the triathlete Alistair Brownlee surprises with his second place‘The people have spoken ... the bastards,” a waspish Dick Tuck observed following his failure to make the California State Senate in 1966. At the end of a year in which electorates throughout the UK and beyond have proved time and again they simply cannot be trusted to make even the simplest choice, it is a sentiment with which BBC panjandrums were happy not to concur at the end of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year beano in Birmingham on Sunday night.They had been utterly terrified the Great British Public would select a one‑two-three of Andy Murray, Mo Farah and...
Alistair helping Jonny to the line in Mexico is a sporting classic already but while encouragement is part of their success they also like to get one over each otherIt took barely hours for the image to become an instant sporting classic. One moment Jonny Brownlee is striding to victory in the final World Triathlon Series race of the season, about to become world champion for the second time; the next his legs buckle beneath him as if punched by an invisible haymaker. Then, just as Jonny is stumbling like a drunk into an official, his elder brother, Alistair, swoops to the rescue, hooking his arm around his shoulder and helping him to cross the line in second place. Jonny...