Football fan violence was far from an invention of the 1980s... It’s one of the most extraordinary and tantalizing facts of our time. Take out all the estimated-to-be-drug-related activity out of the crime figures, and what you are left with are the gentle, pacific, Marpleian levels of fair-cop crime enjoyed in ... Read More...

With Wimbledon getting underway once more, Nige takes a look back at one of tennis's greatest stars... The glamorous, exuberant French tennis player Suzanne Lenglen died in 1938, aged just 39. She died of pernicious anaemia, having been diagnosed with leukaemia, and lost her sight shortly before her death - the ... Read More...

Jon Hotten discovers that Australian cricket legend Jeff Thomson - one of the most dangerous fast bowlers of all time - still knows the right way to tell a story... It was a few hours after David Warner had taken a swing at Joe Root in a Birmingham bar, and Jeff ... Read More...

Machines are already better than humans at chess, and now computers are increasingly important in sports like cricket and baseball. Author Jon Hotten ponders the implications... Writing about the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, Martin Amis said of chess: '[They are playing] the foremost game of ... Read More...

Lance Armstrong's Oprah confessional has put cycling on  the front pages again for all the wrong reasons. But he's hardly the first rider to come to a bad end. Death, drugs, sex and madness -  here are three cautionary tales from cycling's rogues gallery... Tom Simpson Dubbed 'Major Tom' by the French press, ... Read More...

Britain's triumphant Olympic year is drawing to an end - but will it still be remembered in 400 years? And is it time to reinstate the noble sport of dwile flonking in time for Rio?.. Few realise that the first Olympic revival took place not in the 19th century, but exactly ... Read More...

Mark Cosgrove (pictured above) has the talent to be a great Australian cricketer, but he can't get in the side because he refuses to lose weight. But are we missing the upsides of being a fat sportsman, asks Jon Hotten... One of the marks of cricket's ineffable genius is its scale. ... Read More...

Jon Hotten reveals cricket's dirty little secret: nobody likes fielding... In a game at the start of the season, we fielded for 47 overs in the bone-deep cold. The distant pavilion glowed like a cottage in the paintings of that old fraud Thomas Kinkade. The grass on the outfield was thick ... Read More...

Jon Hotten meets his cricketing hero and finds himself saying exactly the one thing he had been determined not to say... When he went to the ring, he was often smiling. He knew that when the heavyweight champion of the world defended his title, it was a solemn moment, but he ... Read More...

Jon Hotten is struck by an old English sitcom's "quiet, unacknowledged and deep-running despair", which features, naturally enough, a game of cricket... You might remember Ever Decreasing Circles, a British - make that English, because it could only be English - sitcom of the early 1980s, the fading final years of ... Read More...