Stories worth passing on
Stories
We tell the stories of teams and champions who no longer exist. Some won everything. Others lost in the way that made them impossible to forget.
The final almost nobody saw
Rotterdam, the eighth of May 1974. A European final, played in a stadium built for more than sixty thousand, in front of a few thousand at most.
A company that made missiles
Matra was not built to go racing. It was a French aerospace and defence concern, and its ordinary work involved guided weapons and the hardware of a country that preferred to arm itself with its own engineering rather than borrow anyone else's.
Three golds, and a fall
Sapporo, February 1972, the first Winter Olympics held in Asia. Over a few days a skater from the Netherlands, Ard Schenk, won three of the four speed-skating titles.
Eleven from thirteen
The swimming at the Montreal Olympics ran to thirteen events for women in the summer of 1976. East Germany won eleven.
The number that reads like an error
Zero. In something close to twenty-five years of professional boxing, Sam Langford was matched for a world title exactly that many times.
The number is twenty-four
That is the age Stanley Ketchel reached and did not pass. A rifle saw to it, on a farm in Missouri, in the autumn of 1910.
The trains that stopped for no reason
Novi Ligure is a small town in the south of Piedmont, out on the plain where the land has not yet begun to climb toward the sea. In the Twenties the express trains running between Turin and Genoa were not timetabled to stop there.
The car at the wrong angle
He drove through corners sideways, and he meant to. The back of the car would step out, the nose pointing somewhere that did not agree with the road, and he would hold the whole sliding mass on the throttle until it settled and drove out straight.
The game no one could quite describe
He was blond and broad, built more like a swimmer than a tennis player, and he hit the ball as though he held a grudge against it and had no fear of the consequences. That is the first thing people reached for when they tried to describe Lew Hoad, and they nearly always gave up somewhere after it.
The empty title
The highest title in chess sat empty for two years. The man who had held it died in 1946, in a hotel on the Portuguese coast, with the crown still his and no one set to take it from him.