The Spirit of the Game

"I remember watching sport from a very young age. One of the Olympics which stood out for me was the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. It was beset by politics and the boycotts from various Eastern Bloc countries. I suppose it was my first introduction to sports and politics together. One of the things Mihir’s book does is to explore that idea. He is a former BBC journalist and a print journalist. I have read a huge amount of what he has written in the sports pages. He writes about everything around sport. It is partly a history of sport but it also goes into the boycotts as well. The title of the book attracted me first and foremost. On the front cover are people like Ben Johnson, Maradona and Muhammad Ali. All these people, in different ways, have been quite controversial in sports. Mihir goes into the history of sports, talks about its origins and then looks at where we are now in terms of money and celebrity and so on. He links it to some of the seedier sides of sport, such as cheating and drugs. You don’t have to love sports to read this book. Instead, it gives you a very interesting back-story to the world of sport. I did sports to start off with because I enjoyed playing them, but then you realise that there is even more politics surrounding sports than there is in politics – as demonstrated by things like the boycotts at the LA Olympics, or all the cheating."