The Iron Man

I’m not hugely into sports. I watch the big soccer games when Ireland plays. I appreciate the skill in a good boxing bout and I sit in awe whenever the Olympics is on and I can watch those jaw-dropping displays the gymnasts put on. Other than that, I’m not that pushed. However, my antennae have picked up on the scandals in Fifa and now also in the International Amateur Athletics Federation – IAAF. Before those, of course, we had the revelations about Lance Armstrong, one-time cycling supremo and now self-confessed drugs cheat.

It’s all enough to give sport a bad name, and it has. The purity of sport is what has been lost in these days of commercialism and scientific advances. But there was a time when those things didn’t matter and when it was the winning that counted and not the rewards to be gleaned from it …