Jack Kelly
High Profile
Our athletes are flying the flagship for British sport.
Fatima Whitbread
Elegance
Watching the Russian female shot-putters is like watching an eighteen-stone ballet dancer.
David Campbell
Hidden Talents
Somewhere inside that flabby body [Geoff Capes’] was an athlete trying to get out.
Stuart Storey
High Flyers
If you want a track team to win the high jump, you find one person who can jump seven feet, not seven people who can each jump one foot.
Frederick E. Terman
Vogue
The only time our girls looked good in Munich was in the discotheque, between 9 and 11 every night.
US Olympic coach
Realism
I know I’m no Kim Basinger – but she can’t throw the javelin.
Fatima Whitbread
Birth Control
The [Olympic] Games need to take the Pill before the sporting explosion gets entirely out of hand.
Peter Wilson
3. Soundbytes
Job Opportunities
If you’re a sporting star, you’re a sporting star. If you don’t quite make it, you become a coach. If you can’t coach, you become a journalist. If you can’t spell, you introduce Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon.
Desmond Lynam
Darwin Revisited
Tonight, a special Horizon programme, Survival of the Fartest … Fastest.
Richard Baker from the BBC cassette Sporting Gaffes
Sequence Of Events
That performance would have won him the Olympic gold medal in the championship four years ago, which he won anyway.
Desmond Lynam, talking about Sebastian Coe
Get To The Bottom Of It
Harvey Glance, the black American sprinter, with the white top and black bottom.
Ron Pickering
A Change Of Plan
When the pace is slow, sometimes the athletes will make a move they hadn’t planned to make earlier in the race than they planned to do it.
Brendan Foster
Insight
Watch the time – it gives you a good indication of how fast they are running.
Ron Pickering
Carried Away
Anything that matters so much to David Coleman, you realise, doesn’t matter so much at all.
Clive James
Des -ire
Desmond Lynam is so laid back, he’s almost horizontal – which is exactly how his legions of fantasising housewifely fans imagine him to be.
Frank Keating
The Invisible Woman
Zola Budd, so small, so waif-like, you literally cannot see her; but there she is.
Alan Parry
Trivia
The world’s fastest woman is an expert cook.
Daily Graphic headline after Fanny Blankers-Koen won Olympic gold in 1948
Power To All Our Friends
The man [Henry Rono] with asbestos lungs.
Ron Pickering
Anyone who loses sleep worrying about the meaning of life will not seek answers among baseball practitioners. But to those who love the game, baseball is the meaning of life. For lovers of the absurd, outrageous and totally bizarre, this selection of sporting quotes could make the proverbial cat laugh. A pot pourri of double entendres, satirical quips and unintentional puns from the tongues of a sporting elite. Reading pleasure for the mischievous and warped.
1. The All-American Game
Hype
Calling it the World Series must impress the world as an example of America’s modesty.
Anon
Run That By Me Again
No wonder nobody comes here [a crowded New York restaurant] to eat – it’s too crowded.
Yogi Berra, New York Yankees
Lords and Masters
Baseball must be a great game to survive the people who run it.
Arthur Daley, sportswriter
Parental Control
I think Little League is all right: it keeps the parents off the street.
Rocky Bridges, Minor League manager
You Don’t Say
[Orel] Hershiser is the only Major League player to have two consecutive pronouns in his surname.
Roger Angell, sportswriter
Descent of the Apes
‘Babe’ Ruth wasn’t born – the sonofabitch fell from a tree.
Joe Duggan, New York Yankees
Ruth
The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail.
Heywood Broun
Crowd Puller
Houston has its largest crowd of the night here this evening.
Jerry Coleman, (in)famous commentator
Billy the Kid
A baseball fan has the digestive apparatus of a billy goat. He can – and does – devour any set of diamond statistics with insatiable appetite and then nuzzles hungrily for more.
Arthur Daley
Speed
The Mets [baseball team] has come along slow, but fast!
Casey Stengel
Beauty and the Beast
1. It’s no fun being married to an electric light.
Joe DiMaggio on his marriage to Marilyn Monroe
2. I don’t know if it’s good for baseball, but it sure beats the hell out of rooming with Phil Rizzuto!
Yogi Berra on the marriage
3. Why marry a ball player when you can have the whole team?
Mae West on the marriage
4. It proves that no man can be a success in two national pastimes.
Oscar Levant on the break-up of the marriage
The Demon Drink
Two of the pall-bearers at Babe Ruth’s funeral in August 1948 were teammates