Roger Alton

When you sit down next weekend (13 February) to watch the first competitors blast through the starting gate of the men’s downhill, the blue riband event of this year’s Winter Olympics in Whistler, I hope you will spare a moment to think back to a clear but windy day in Switzerland more than 80 years

If shrinks don’t have a term like disproportionate response — you know, getting jailed for clearing the snow off your path or some such madness — then they certainly should have. We need it to do justice to the lunatic levels of hoo-ha, from players, commentators and fans, over Graeme Smith’s referral and phantom snick in the

New Year starter for ten: who said this? ‘When you hear people on TV talking about you in the same breath as people like Steven Gerrard or Freddie Flintoff, you look at it as if they’re talking about someone else. It’s weird. It’s very humbling and gives you a lump in your throat.’ No, not

Forget the Spectator Parliamentarian Awards, or the Oscars for that matter, it’s the annual Spectator Sports Awards that count. Indeed in Hollywood, the Oscars are known as the Spectator Sports Awards of the film industry. Our judges have been busier than Rachel Uchitel’s lawyers sorting out our shortlists, and now finally a roster of winners

Sprawling, cheesy, gimmicky, full of toe-curlingly embarrassing interviews — but still the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award, dammit, lifts the spirits in a way few other events in the sporting calendar manage. Sunday night. Pull up a chair. Grab a drink. It only needs that theme tune to strike up for me to

Of all the many incidental pleasures of the Spectator Editors’ Dinner last week, one of the most enjoyable was sharing a main course with Coleraine businessman Ken Belshaw and his wife Iris. Ken, a passionate rugby man, was filling me in on the glories of Irish sport, ironically at exactly the same time as, unknown

Amid the great and the glamorous sipping champagne at Sotheby’s recently when Sebastian Faulks launched his new novel, A Week in December, one diminutive figure caught the eye as he moved effortlessly among the mini-burgers and drizzled tuna, exchanging a pleasantry here, a smile there, chatting to teenage boys, rock stars, highbrow literary types and

Consider this: barring the intervention of an usually malevolent deity, Bath’s Matt Banahan should be playing on the wing for England during the autumn rugby internationals. Banahan is 22 years old, 6ft 7in tall, and weighs in at 253lbs, or a shade over 18st. Go back 30-odd years and there on the wing for England

Africa’s time has come You couldn’t ask for a more devoted fan of Fabio Capello than me, but thank the Lord for that over-excitable defeat in the Ukraine last weekend. While the brow-furrowed Italian has turned an underachieving bunch of good players into a remarkably high-performance Roller of an outfit, something of a Lehman-style bubble

All good things must come to an end and so, sadly, do the mind-bogglingly scandalous things. Go on, admit it. We lapped up every twist and turn of Briatore’s turbo-charged chicanery. We marvelled at the sheer ridiculousness of the day-glo ‘blood’ spouting from Tom Williams’s mouth. We hissed at football’s foul play — from diving

In a recent issue of the brilliant weekly glossy magazine produced by the French sports paper L’Equipe, there is a picture that tells you all you need to know about modern football. It shows the owner of Manchester City, Sheikh Kaldoon al-Mubarak, leaving the stadium after the home game against Wolves. He is being driven

Amid all the fake blood and thunder, car-crashing, bashing and diving that has scarred the games we love in recent days, it is time for those few of us still deluded enough to believe that sport represents the very best that life can offer to reflect on a very happy man. Well, you assume he’s

Well, that wasn’t too bad then. The nameless sense of dread that seizes you at the start of each football season — you know, too many overtattooed men chanting En-ger-land, too many managers bitching at refs and each other, too many twerps earning too much money — all dissipated in a few minutes of sublime

Not since Anita Ekberg cavorted in the Trevi fountain for Fellini’s cameras nearly half a century ago has the Eternal City seen a display of sensual aquatic superstardom quite like it. Federica Pellegrini was the undoubted galactica of the World Swimming Championships, bringing the capital, and the country, to a halt when she hit the

After the Lord’s Test you have to hand it to Ricky Ponting and the boys in the Baggy Greens — they have a sense of sportsmanship that is pretty much fair dinkum. As Adam Gilchrist explains in his brilliant autobiography, True Colours, the Aussie sporting psyche takes its lead from the school playing field. That

It was when Charlie Starmer-Smith, son of England’s Nigel and no mean scrum half in his own right, pulled himself to his full height of 5ft something, peered a long way up and asked Simon Shaw, the Lions and England oak tree of a second row, whether he’d mind if he, Charlie, tried to lift

In just over a week, on the day of the Wimbledon ladies final, or if you prefer, which I do, the third test between the Lions and the Springboks in Johannesburg, 180-odd riders in the heart of Monaco will set off at intervals for the opening time-trial stage of the Tour de France. It will

For obvious nomenclatural reasons I have always followed the triumphs of Roger Federer with especial interest, as massive back-page headlines like ‘Masterful Roger Rules the World’, or ‘Is Roger the Best Ever?’ lift the spirits no end. And now only 10 days to Wimbledon and the headlines will be back again. Roger the Great clearly wants

There’s nothing easier than betting with hindsight, but you have to say that Coral’s offer of 3-1 on the four teams in the Premiership relegation scrap — Hull, Sunderland, Boro and Newcastle — failing to win was of a generosity to make even the Commons Fees Office blanch. Sure enough they all did even worse and

There’s an awful lot of ghastliness in sport: from Didier Drogba, John Terry and Michael Ballack raving at the referee (that’s the captains of Germany and England behaving like a couple of hysterical schoolgirls), to a sozzled Ledley King shouting the odds at a nightclub doorman. Or Chris Gayle coming over to lead a totally demoralised