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Byline: Brian Viner Frankel. It is not a name that rolls off the tongue, like those of some other great thoroughbred racehorses, such as Nijinsky, Mill Reef and Brigadier Gerard. [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER Britain has enjoyed other great sporting summers. Lodged in the collective memory bank are a few magical weeks in 1966, and the famous Ashes campaigns of 1981 [...]

Byline: . Brian Viner As catchphrases go it didn't amount to much, but 'I wanna tell you a story', his hands dangling and flapping almost as if he was conducting [...]

Byline: Brian Viner EVERY Olympic Games yields a champion for the ages, a champion whose name remains forever synonymous with those Games no matter what nationality you are, no matter [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER IT IS the savage cruelty of sport that six-tenths of a second can separate euphoria from despair. Yesterday, Zac Purchase and Mark Hunter were on the wrong [...]

Byline: Brian Viner THE greatest show on earth and the greatest city on earth have complemented each other perfectly these last eight days. Of course, it is decidedly un-British to [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER THE TRAINING has been intensive, the mental preparation just as important as the physical, and yesterday it all seemed worthwhile. After some final limbering up, and a [...]

Byline: Brian Viner Sodom and Gomorrah are not among the 205 nations taking part in the Olympic Games this summer, but they would fit right in, at least if a [...]

Byline: Brian Viner The indignity of being toilet-trained, I had assumed, was, in more ways than one, behind me. But that was before I took a bespoke holiday in the [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER The 50th BBC Sports Personality of the Year jamboree takes place on Sunday, preceded every evening this week by a programme called Simply The Best, in which [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER THERE ARE four kinds of tycoons in football. There is the kind, such as John Magnier at Manchester United, who have no particular interest in the game [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER The England football team have drawn the mighty French in the group stage of next summer's European Championships, a draw festooned with irony, not least as 2004 [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER IT HAS been said before but it's worth repeating: if Audley Harrison could box like he can talk, he would already be world heavyweight champion. Indeed, we [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER Michael Palin, as everyone knows, is officially the nicest man in showbusiness. But Martin Kemp is muscling in. 'I've heard he's lovely,' says the person I know [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER CLIVE WOODWARD giving a press conference is like no other England coach giving a press conference. Respect attends his every word. Platitudes that would at the very [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER Marigold, the free-range chicken we assumed had been snaffled by a fox, has returned, intact, to the fold. I'm all for renaming her Agatha, after Agatha Christie, [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER Our excellent mobile cinema, the Flicks in the Sticks, has not passed through our north Herefordshire parish for a while, so I still haven't seen Calendar Girls, [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER THE GREAT amateur golfer Bobby Jones once said that he could take everything out of his life except his experiences at St Andrews and still have had [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER SO, THE first Test against South Africa is unfolding without Graham Thorpe, one of the few Englishmen capable of racking up runs as powerfully as the supposedly [...]

Byline: Brian Viner A couple of Saturdays ago we threw a party to celebrate our first year in Herefordshire. We hired a woman from Ledbury, the excellent Emma Gawlik, to [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER This, in the week of the Open Championship at Royal St George's, Sandwich - a club that not only does not admit women as members but makes [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER A few miles from us stands a medieval castle called, slightly confusingly, Hampton Court. It has wonderful, extensive gardens, open to the public, but is unrelated to [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER One of our chickens is missing. When yesterday I went to lock them up for the night I found that Marigold, the gold seabright with an exquisite [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER AFTER HAVING a little fun a couple of columns ago at the expense of Radio 5 Live presenter Adrian Chiles - who promptly showed what a very [...]

Byline: BRIAN VINER IT IS AT least 15 years since Rex Bellamy wrote in The Times about a Norwich-based tennis player called Uli Nganga. 'One of the Norfolk Ngangas,' Bellamy [...]

HEATH STREAK, the 29-year-old captain of the Zimbabwe cricket team, has big, brown, rather doleful eyes, like those of a spaniel. But to his critics he is more of a [...]

LET ME share with you my theory about tycoons, which is that a disproportionate number of them are either uncommonly big men, or uncommonly little. The big ones, my theory [...]

As we zoomed southward on the M40 on Saturday, several advertising hoardings flashed by us, proclaiming the convenience of the train. Truly, advertising is a precarious business. Had we been [...]

It's St Patrick's Day on Monday, which means that, shortly after you have finished reading these words, there will be someone, somewhere - if not in a pub in Ballyhooly, [...]

SPORTS MINISTERS come, and sports ministers go, and rarely do they make much of an impression except with their backsides on the best seats in the directors' box. An exception [...]

THERE WAS standing room only on the 9.59 from Oxford to London Paddington on Saturday morning - and precious little of that. If the accessory of choice on the weekday [...]

The flight from London to Melbourne, which seems interminable, at least stops after 14 hours in Singapore, where there is an opportunity to ward off deep-vein thrombosis by power-walking round [...]

`Kirkpatrick... to Bryan Williams... This is great stuff... Phil Bennett covering... chased by Alistair Scown... Brilliant... Oh, that's brilliant... John Williams... Pullin... John Dawes, great dummy... David, Tom David, the [...]

THE PERENNIALLY thorny issue of whether leading figures and institutions in sport should set a moral, or at least behavioural, example off the field of play loomed even larger than [...]

ON BOXING DAY, Adrian Maguire will more than likely be in front of the telly at his home in Farringdon, Oxfordshire, watching the King George VI Chase at Kempton Park. [...]

Maurice O'Grady of Leo Pest Control in Leominster made his debut in this column last week, and I have a feeling he might become a regular. He came back last [...]

IN When We Were Kings, the brilliant documentary about the 1974 world heavyweight championship fight immortalised as the 'Rumble in the Jungle', Norman Mailer and George Plimpton, heavyweights in the [...]

As England's cricketers prepare for another onslaught of batting or bowling by the manifestly superior Australians in tomorrow's Test in Adelaide - the second in an Ashes series that already [...]

It is a bright spring day in midtown Manhattan, and inside the foyer of the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway, home of The Late Show with David Letterman, several perky [...]

Not content with exposing the nation's myopia with its poll to find the greatest Briton of all time - respondents to which seem unable to see beyond Diana, Princess of [...]

KINGSHOLM. IT is not a name to make the pulse quicken of anyone who is not a supporter of Gloucester Rugby Union Football Club. It is an unlovely sort of [...]

WE ARE sitting in a grand committee room at Lord's, surveying a scene of slightly upsetting devastation out in the middle where the venerable outfield, which is to be relaid [...]

ROYAL JUBILEE summers have an agreeable habit of producing memorable victories for British sportsmen and women thriving, all on their own, in the crucible of fierce expectation. At first glance [...]

Tomorrow, world order will be restored, so we have been led to believe, with ITV's reinstatement of Blind Date at 7pm, and the shunting of the channel's beleaguered football highlights [...]

MORETON, A drab little town on the Wirral, figures pretty high on the list of places one might expect not to run into Earnie Shavers, the former heavyweight boxer from [...]

IT IS piddling down outside Mark Richardson's flat, which pretty much matches the mood within. Athletes as talented as Richardson are not meant to spend the Olympic Games in a [...]