Flying Finish and other stories

 For the benefit of those highbrows who devote themselves to the likes of Tolstoy at the expense of reading Dick Francis, I'd like to outline the story of Flying Finish.

As is customary in a Dick Francis book, the horse and jockey survive various scrapes and the skullduggery of the villains and each chapter ends cliff-hangingly looking as if they can't possibly make it to Cheltenham for the Champion Hurdle but deep down you imagine they probably will and they do. 

In the last chapter they get there in one piece - okay, one piece each - and set off for a couple of laps of Prestbury Park. It's not quite going to plan but they are in position to challenge for the lead coming to the last but I think they hit the hurdle or don't quite get it right and set off in pursuit of the leader up the hill, closing, closing but the line comes just too soon and they get beat and 'that's racing'.

 

Mark Cavendish's story in this year's Tour de France was no less dramatic.

It's some years since his heyday and Golden Age when he racked up wins in sprint stages and specialized in the final stage on the Champs-Élysées.  He is now 36 and it looked very much like he was a back number, riding in lesser races for smaller teams, not getting into the Tour, suffering depression and a syndrome or two. Nobody expected to see him in the Tour this year until the main sprinter in his team was indisposed a couple of days before it and he came in as a late replacement, four behind Eddy Merckx in the Most Stage Wins list. Still nobody thought he would threaten that. It wasn't something that could happen.

However, with a well-drilled team around him and a convenient dearth of top sprinters there to take him on, each of the absentees with their own reasons, he won a stage to the great joy of his devoted supporters, of which I'm one, no longer having many current favourite sportspersons to follow. He won two more and then equalled Merckx in some kind of fairy tale fashion and still had two chances to get number 35.

Having missed the first of those it was still all set up for a historic finale in Paris and Corals made him 8/15 fav to do so. I didn't back him because I didn't want to jinx him and could hardly bear the tension. Some things are surely more important than cruel hard cash even in this age of monetized sport. But it did look like money for nothing and more than 50% interest on your money in an afternoon is a very competitive rate compared to what you'll get out of an ISA.

Towards the end of a meaningful horse race, which means one with significant money involved, I tend to rise from my horizontal couch position to the 'edge of my seat' and so I did for this in the last 5 kms. 

Where's the Green Jersey. That'll do. That's okay. Lost the ideal position. Commentator says he's got it back. And then the last 500 metres is like the last furlong of a flat sprint handicap at Goodwood and frankly it all happens too quickly. Oh, no, he's boxed in on the rails. I'm sure he missed a beat stuck in behind with nowhere to go before the gap came too late and that's him, in green on the right of the picture in third, beaten maybe a length.

He won the green jersey which is regarded as second only to the yellow, confounded any but the most outrageously optimistic expectations and for me only has Gareth Southgate to worry about for Sports Personality of the Year because he is one, charismatic and with attitude, somehow apologetic in manner and apparently vulnerable while being supremely good at what he does. I'm not usually very taken with sporting nicknames and am happy for my litany of heroes to be called Derek Randall, George Best, Alex Higgins, Janet Tebbutt, Michael Holding, etc. but The Manx Missile suits Cav very well.

I didn't wait around for the interviews to hear what he said about next year but I dare say he'll be back aged 37. It's great to see the comeback, like Kauto Star, a few by Muhammed Ali and even Lester Piggott but I'm not particularly concerned about the record. That doesn't really matter. It was a tremendous story as it was. It could have been written by Dick Francis.

Oh, yes. It already had been.

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Back with the Tolstoy, one can't help thinking that it's mainly about 'how best to live' on some well-intentioned, holistic level.

I think 'a purpose' would come into my manifesto for that and while I'm not complaining about a life of uninterrupted leisure and have no particular ambitions to achieve beyond keeping the turf account in the plus and the chess ratings respectable, even approaching 62 it surely isn't quite over yet.

A big, new project needs many gallons of impetus behind it because it will surely need to overcome difficulties. I heard a 'poet' on the wireless a few weeks ago who had written 14 sonnets and then a fifteenth made up of the last lines of the other 14. Now there's a challenge. So I managed one and then had to have a lie down ever since.

It needs to be worthwhile. It doesn't have to see print and have one traipsing round Ledbury, Cheltenham and all the festivals trying to sell copies. Heaven forbid but one likes to think one's achieved something. While watching the TdF I had little difficulty resisting the urge to get a new bike.

But I have had a sort of place-holding idea that might stretch out for a while.

The Collected Poems, from the late 1970's to now, paring down the booklets from what seemed worthy of print then to what still does now. It might not be a big document if I'm diligent enough but moving into the computer, kindle and download age, I needn't wait any longer for Farrar, Straus and Giroux to ask for the rights. Doing it as a pdf saves on paper, cost, waste, environmental footprint and could be updated for later editions, one imagines, very easily.

So maybe I'll do that.The more recent volumes are on Word docs, it will encourage me to think twice about typing out again any poems that aren't and I can persuade myself I'm editing, if not 'curating', that body of work while thinking of a title, a cover picture and some gentle sentiments for a foreword.

Maybe that's what I'll do.