Contradiction right at heart of the enigma that is Kieren Fallon

By the Times Chief Sports Writer Simon Barnes

Jockeys are a difficult bunch. It’s a mixture of short man’s chippiness and the demands of the job, a series of brusque, even brutal, wham-bam relationships with an endless series of partners. Thus we have the depression of Fred Archer, the pathological meanness of Lester Piggott, Willie Carson’s outbreaks of spitefulness, and even Frankie Dettori has a dark side.

But Kieren Fallon is different. I have had long chats with him on two or three occasions and each time I walked away thinking: “What a nice guy. If only they were all like that.” Fallon’s CV speaks of someone you would cross the M25 to avoid, but the man himself is quite different.

All the same, there was the time when he pulled a rival jockey off his horse — brilliant, in a way, because a racing saddle and an oated-up thoroughbred do not make a stable platform for judo. Whatever else Fallon may be, he is not so much a magnet for trouble as a black hole. Incomprehensible forces of gravitation tug every possible aspect of strife and destruction towards him. And so, even as his corruption trial collapses, we hear that he has failed a drugs test for cocaine, a matter still in the arena of the unproven as we await the findings for the B sample.

And yet the man I met was a champion jockey filled with humility, lost in admiration for Dettori’s style, expressing a touching eagerness to improve. You can see his hidden nature in the way he rides, in the impulsive, nanosecond seizing of a gap. But for the rest — well, he has some of the most well-mannered demons you could possibly wish to be introduced to. One of the strangest men I’ve ever met.

As reports in different newspapers claim that José Mourinho has (a) signed up as England’s next head coach and (b) performed an about-turn and joined Barcelona, the fact to bear in mind is that neither scenario would come as the least surprise. Mourinho obeys neither laws nor conventions. He pleases himself and if he gets the England job, he will do it for himself alone.

I take my hat (and shirt) off to Giggs

I remember attending a football match in which opposition supporters sang of their hatred for Ryan Giggs. Not for the first or the last time, I was bemused by a football crowd. How can anyone hate Ryan Giggs? He’s another of those athletes who lift the heart.

He has just scored his 100th league goal for Manchester United, so it’s a nice moment to applaud him as he lifts his bat, and to muse on the idiosyncratic gallop – at full pace, he is recognisable from half a mile away – and that expression, seen far too often, alas, of profound and innocent bewilderment because the ball that he has struck has failed to find the goal.

No Ordinary Joe

By the BBC’s Derek ‘Robbo’ Robson

Well a bit of justice was done on Sunday.

Not the Boro’s utter dismantling of them Arsenal boys that left Arsene Wenger with the usual gripes about teams doing their nasty hard tackles on his darling boys. (No mention of the happy-slapping Eboue, mind).

Nah, we gave the Sports Personality Award to the right person. He should’ve got in the top three last year at the very least, but the forelock-tugging numb-nuts of the British public decided to chuck it the way of a toff and her gee-gee.

Calzaghe has not lost for 10 years. Sports Personality of the Decade, then.

Now I’ve heard them that’s in the know banging on about how boxing shouldn’t really be recognised in this way. And I’ve heard some long-winded apologies from boxing fans on phone-ins and the like.

The issue comes up when a likeable sort of fella like Ricky ‘Hitman’ Hatton (or Rick-yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyuh Hitman H-aaaaaaaa-tuuuuuuuuuunnnn as he’s now known) gets dumped on the canvas by a sickening blow.

Your medical profession says people shouldn’t be paid to inflict brain damage on each other. It’s hard to argue against that.

Your pro-fight lobby reel off a string of cliches such as:

1. It keeps young men off the streets.
Right. So does footy training but you don’t have blokes bashing the hell out of each other (if we ignore Messrs Bowyer and Barton, allegedly)

Joe Calzaghe-A deserving winner

I was absolutely delighted yesterday when Joe Calzaghe won the prestigious BBC Sports Personality of the Year for 2007. Calzaghe received just under 178,000 votes to beat off firm favourite Lewis Hamilton who gained around 122,000 votes. Calzaghe has had an incredible career with a fighting record which stands at 44-0. He has been the longest reigning title holder of any weight class in boxing which has just passed the 10 year mark. He beat Peter Manfredo Jr earlier this year and then beat Mikkel Kessler to unify the WBA, WBC, WBO, and Ring Magazine super middleweight titles which was another incredible achievement and confirmed him as one of the best pound for pound fighters in the world.

It is great that the British public decided to vote for a true champion rather than Lewis Hamilton who was a close runner-up. Don’t get me wrong as Hamilton is incredibly talented and had an astonishing year considering he was a rookie. I reckon(and so do many others!) that he will win the Formula 1 world championship sooner rather than later and it will be nice to see him win the Sports Personality Award when he does. However if he had won this year it would not have reflected sporting achievement but general popularity which is not really what I think the award is about. Calzaghe has truly achieved sporting excellence in his field and has been given the recognition he thoroughly deserves.

Lewis Hamilton - a very British sort of victor

By the Times Simon Barnes

So which loser shall we give it to this year? Lewis Hamilton, who lost the Formula One drivers’ World Championship, is favourite to win the BBC Sports Personality of the Year; he’s 5-2 on. It’s a done deal.

There is a great tradition of Formula One losers being made Sports Personality of the Year; Nigel Mansell in 1986, Damon Hill in 1994. Silver medal is the prize for the first loser: that, and the BBC Sports Personality award.

It’s not only drivers. There is a national habit of giving the award to people who haven’t won anything and that is, at least on the face of it, an odd thing in a business that is supposed to be about winning and nothing else. On five occasions since 1990 the award has gone to a nonwinner. That is to say, a loser. In 1990 it went to Paul Gascoigne, for losing to West Germany in the semi-finals of the World Cup. England finished fourth in that tournament after losing the third-place play-off. Gascoigne cried and didn’t even take a penalty in the shoot-out (he had been substituted).

In 1994 Hill got the award for not being Formula One world champion. It was the year he was driven off the track by Michael Schumacher; it was a sort of consolation prize from a sympathetic nation.

In 1997 Greg Rusedski got the award for being the losing finalist in the US Open tennis tournament. He lost to Pat Rafter, of Australia, in four sets; perhaps the fact that he won a set and was wearing a black armband for Diana, Princess of Wales, swayed everybody’s judgment.

The next year the award went to Michael Owen. The striker scored a great goal for England against Argentina, but England lost the match on penalties and so they went out of the competition in the round of 16. Is that as far from being a winner as an award-winner can get?

No, actually. In 2001 David Beckham won it. He got the award after England qualified for the World Cup finals in melodramatic fashion, almost losing to Greece in the last match in the qualifying group before Beckham’s swirling 93rd minute free kick made it 2-2. So England didn’t even win the match and, rather than actually wining something, England simply counted themselves among the 32 nations who would take part in the tournament. Not exactly world-beating stuff.

Now there are a number of ways of looking at this, but the first thing to be clear about is that we are by no means bigoted in our national taste for winners. (The past five recipients of the award have been serious winners: Paula Radcliffe, Jonny Wilkinson, Kelly Holmes, Andrew Flintoff and Zara Phillips).

But we are not pedantic about sporting heroes. We prefer winners, but we are happy to embrace the right kind of loser. In other words, losing also has a kind of beauty.

There is perfection and a beauty about defeat, but above all there is sometimes a story, a vivid tale of a cosmic striving and a desperate falling-short. Sport doesn’t only give you impregnable and immaculate heroes, it also gives you flawed heroes and flawed losers that excite our love. The nation judges and tomorrow night a loser will win.

Me? I’d vote for Christine Ohuruogu, but there you go.

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