Roger Alton

So Smiley was right all along: the bloody Russians were the baddest of the bad. The Pound report on the epic scale of their state-sponsored doping and cheating in athletics was indeed seismic. It can’t have come as that much of a surprise, though. In a remarkable investigation in July 2013, Martha Kelner and Nick Harris of the Mail on Sunday blew the lid on the whole cesspool of Russian corruption. This was the headline: Drugs, -bribery and the cover-up! -Russian athletes— including those who robbed Brits of medals — ‘ordered to dope by coaches’ and officials ‘demanded cash to mask positive tests’. Pretty much what we got this week from Dick Pound, the gunslinging sheriff brought in to clean up the sport.

Not since Walter Palmer, a cudddly Minnesota dentist, put down his drill and vanished off the face of the earth having made sure that Cecil the Lion took a crossbow bolt for the team, has there been a disappearance quite like it. I refer of course to Craig Joubert, the hapless Durban-born referee last seen leaving scorch marks in the Twickenham turf as he sprinted for safety after mistakenly (as it turns out) awarding the Australians a penalty in the last minute of the Rugby World Cup quarter-final against Scotland. Now Joubert has been chucked under the bus by World Rugby, the governing body, who agree that he shouldn’t have given the penalty. But poor guy: who hasn’t made a mistake? Just ask Franz Beckenbauer.

England did have some clear winners in their otherwise beached Rugby World Cup campaign in the unlikely form of Lawrence Dallaglio, Martin Johnson and Jack Whitehall, principals in the dazzling Samsung Rugby School TV ads. Superbly funny and brilliantly filmed, the ads take a chipper Whitehall through the finer points of rugby with, among others, Jason Robinson and a bulky, greying but still mighty scary Jason Leonard. You won’t see many things more fabulous than former England star Maggie Alphonsi chucking Whitehall about 20 yards backwards when he tries to tackle her. And Johnners, who knew? Such comic timing. What are we going to do without them? It’s a pity that some of those guys, not to mention the mighty Maggie, weren’t ready to strap on their boots for England.

Pity poor Chris Robshaw. England’s sturdy captain might have a knockout girlfriend and exceptional skills on the cappuccino machine, but he has taken one hell of a pounding from Her Majesty’s armchair battalion of former players and coaches, much more than he took from Sam Warburton at Twickenham on Saturday. Give the guy a break. His decision to go for a line-out and set up a possible winning try rather than attempt a very difficult penalty kick at goal to draw ‘defied belief’ said one newspaper, the same paper that described a similar decision by the Japan captain Michael Leitch in that miraculous last-gasp victory over South Africa as ‘faultless’.

A thumping physical confrontation testing mind, muscle and sinew to the ultimate degree, and from which there could only be one winner. No, not the upcoming Rugby World Cup but the breathtaking confrontation between Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic in the US Open final. Rain delays meant that for British audiences it didn’t start till the small hours, and only we dedicated insomniacs could catch it. A pity, because it was one of the most bruising and thrilling of their 42 battles, stretching back over eight years. It even had a garnish of audience bad behaviour —what else do you expect from the Yanks? — which Novak acknowledged with his characteristic amazing grace.

Sebastian Coe’s new job as head of world athletics will be a heck of a lot easier thanks to the outstanding World Championships that just finished in Beijing. He has a chance to push athletics back to the forefront of world sport — after all, what is more thrilling than one human being trying to outrun another? The star was Usain Bolt, but even that unassuming giant of a man cannot go on for ever. Athletics needs characters, champions that people can identify with, preferably in the blue--riband events. And Beijing showed there are outstanding athletes waiting to step forward. Julius Yego took gold in the javelin with a throw of 92.72 metres — just over 100 yards. For those of us who did the 100 yards at school, the finishing line seemed a long way away.

The roar of the Premier League is beginning to drown out everything else in sport (there’s even Friday night football now: another blissful resting place occupied. Shouldn’t we ring-fence some time — greenbelt-style — that football can’t colonise, say 2 a.m. on a Monday, that’s preserved from football’s endless development?) But while there’s a chance, let’s not lose sight of a great Englishman and a great English achievement. This Ashes series has not been a good contest; they often aren’t. But with his modesty, determination and resilience, it has been a personal triumph for the captain Alastair Cook.

Jumping the shark isn’t yet an Olympic sport, but if it were the International Olympic Committee would be a shoo-in for gold. And silver and bronze too. Amid some low-key hoopla last week, the IOC awarded the 2022 Winter Games to Beijing. Yes, that’s the same Beijing that staged the 2008 Olympics and in a couple of weeks will put on the World Athletics Championships. The 2022 bidding boiled down to a two-horse race between Almaty, Kazakhstan, which at least has some snow; and Beijing, which doesn’t. The previous front-runner, Oslo, withdrew its bid last autumn after all the main political parties rejected the funding plans for the Games.

I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give up? In the past few days, they have pulled one out of the bag against the Springboks in the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when they looked buried; trailing 20—17 with time up, they turned down a penalty kick and went for the win with an 82nd-minute try. Their Davis Cup tennis boys came from 2—0 down to beat Kazakhstan, with Lleyton Hewitt hauling his weary muscles through the motions once more. Afterwards Hewitt said, ‘I love the back-against-the-wall situation. This is what dreams are made of.’ Now they face Britain, that is the Murrays, not least Judy, in the semis.

Well thank heaven for Nick Kyrgios. The lavishly inked, blinged and barbered Aussie is quite one of the most thrilling spectacles in tennis. And in a so-far magnificent Wimbledon he has caught the eye more than most. Just as he would want. Much pursing of tennis writers’ lips at Kyrgios’s behaviour during his defeat by the beautifully cultivated Frenchman Richard Gasquet, but really what was the harm? After being ticked off for swearing, Kyrgios went on a brilliantly childish sulk, not bothering to try in Gasquet’s next service game, deliberately steering one ball into the net and just walking away from the next service. It was hilarious and just what tennis wants in my view. Afterwards he was asked why he hadn’t tried to get to the serve.

A car crash is a terrible thing, but hordes of people still slow down to cop an eyeful on the motorway. Car-crash sport is equally compelling. In the US Open, up at Chambers Bay, Tiger Woods opened with two of the worst rounds he had ever played: 80, with eight bogeys and one triple bogey, and 76 before heading home. But no matter how dismal his performance, he had a huge number of spectators shouting in support. Fellow players refuse to write him off, former golfers are less amiable. One-time Open champion Tom Weiskopf said Woods ‘had gone from the top of Mount Everest to the bottom of a coal mine’. Greg Norman said he ‘looks lost’ on a golf course. This is a 14-time Major winner made to look like a club hacker by... By what? By a chaotic private life?

A rather desultory Test series is taking place in the Caribbean where Australia are marmalising the West Indies, with a one-time Bournemouth club cricketer called Adam Voges scoring his maiden Test century at the near-pensionable age of 35 (the oldest ever as it happens: bodes well for the Ashes, doesn’t it?). During lunch the other day Sky showed clips of the 2003 Test in St John’s, Antigua, between the same sides. That was when Sarwan and Chanderpaul both scored centuries in the second innings to steer the West Indies to their historic winning fourth innings total of 418–7. At one point Glenn McGrath, yes the great McGrath, advances on little Sarwan, who barely comes up to his midriff, and bends down to give him a torrent of abuse. Their faces are inches apart.

If heaven is a place on earth, as Belinda Carlisle so wisely observed, then surely that place has to be Lord’s on a Test match Saturday. Celestial indeed, and a privilege to have been there for just a part of what was one of the most thrilling Test matches in history. More runs scored than ever before in a Lord’s Test, 40 wickets taken, three magnificent centuries, technically brilliant from Williamson, sage and resolute from the Cook of old, jaw-dropping and Botham-esque from Stokes and five days of extraordinary sportsmanship. There is no more civilised place to watch sport than Lord’s. I love the fact that it still trusts spectators enough to allow them to bring in their own alcohol and doesn’t kick up a fuss when champagne corks are popped on to the outfield.

If you watched England’s three-day Test defeat by the West Indies in Barbados the other day to the bitter end you will have heard some of the England players being interviewed afterwards. They uniformly referred to their coach, the now departed Peter Moores, as ‘Mooresie’. And therein you feel lies a few of the problems infesting English cricket. It’s hard to imagine even John Terry shouting across the car park: ‘Oi Mouro, that was bang out of order.’ Or in an earlier time, a post-match David Beckham telling the world about ‘Fergie’. No, it was always The Boss, or Sir Alex. I know we are all in favour of flat management structures, shirt sleeves, no ties, Dave and Sam, a few beers after work. But Mooresie? Seriously?

Here’s an election-winning idea for Dave: forget about Aston Villa (or West Ham) and become a full-on Bournemouth fan. They were on the telly the other night, all but sealing promotion to the Premier League, and played a bit like Brazil: fluent high-speed passing, wave after wave of attacks. They play in a very smart red-and-black strip that’s not easily confused with anyone else unless AC Milan come calling. A few years back they were nearly out of the Football League: now they’ll be mixing it with Manchester United and Arsenal. And I’ll bet they won’t go back down. They have their own reclusive Russian petrochemical billionaire, a cove named Maxim Demin, about whom it is almost impossible to find anything.

He’s a tall man, Kevin Pietersen, and he casts a long shadow. It loomed large over the Long Room at Lord’s last week where the great, the good, and the not very good at all of the cricket world had gathered for the annual Wisden dinner, one of the most enjoyable events in the life of man. For starters, indeed only a few minutes before we did get stuck into our starters, the hapless Paul Downton had been suddenly sacked as managing director of English cricket. It seems nonsense to blame Downton for all the failures of the England team, but he was the main man in the room for the botched firing of Pietersen last year.

The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors in the same year, and has only been done once, by the extraordinary Bobby Jones in 1930. Jones was awarded a ticker-tape reception in New York, and a golfing writer of the time with a feel for geometry called it ‘The Impregnable Quadrilateral’, a fortress that could never be taken. Jones, a lawyer by profession and unimpeachably honourable in his play, was a canny young man as well as a remarkable player: he had backed himself for the grand slam at the start of the year with a British bookmaker at 50-1. He eventually collected $60,000, or getting on for $11 million today. Who wouldn’t look forward to popping down to Ladbrokes to pick up a slice of that?

For anyone who knows or cares about rock climbing — a minority sport if ever there was one, albeit pretty extreme — the turn of the year was heaven. Newspapers, magazines and TV bulletins were full of one specific, highly photogenic though very technical event: the first free ascent of a climb on Yosemite’s mighty El Capitan face called Dawn Wall. It was 3,000 ft and 32 pitches long, and rated the hardest pure rock climb in the world. The two climbers, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, spent 19 days on the face, but years preparing and training for it. This is, for the time being, the ultimate climb, very difficult but also very safe, with ropes and other gear used to protect the climbers, and entirely free in that they never used any artificial aids.

It used to be such a treat of a winter weekend, sitting down to watch France against Wales in Paris in the Six Nations. And not just because of the anthems. There would be the prospect of seeing players like Sella, Serge Blanco, the Williamses, JJ and JPR, Philippe Saint-André, Scott Gibbs, Rives, Jenkins — an almost endless list of exquisite, fluid runners, the essence of rugby genius. Now less so. It’s Mathieu Bastareaud and Jamie Roberts, a fifth of a ton of gristle and bone, banging into each other. The main question now is quite how poor Les Bleus will be. You can see it all in the resigned but deeply fed-up expression on the face of Thierry Dusautoir, the French captain.

Graeme Swann arrived late for the last cricket World Cup. His wife had given birth before the tournament and he was given leave to miss the warm-ups and just arrive for the first match. No need to worry: it was only the Netherlands, the competition’s weakest side. Naturally England nearly lost it, but Swann took two wickets. At the press conference, Swann was asked about leaving his new baby son. ‘I’m sure he’ll give me shit in the future for missing the first two months of his life,’ he said, ‘and I’ll reply: sorry son, I had to go and help England beat the Dutch.’ England have made a habit of being embarrassed by the Dutch.