They’re stacked on top of the desk in front of me here, piled up nearly a couple of dozen high. The sports books of 2025. Rugby, boxing, GAA, more rugby, athletics, soccer, cycling, yet more rugby. All of them windows into worlds unseen. Or worlds unseeable, maybe.
Do this job long enough and you become all too convinced of its limitations. You kid yourself that you’re a walking font of insight, that you know what makes sportspeople tick, that you’re a reliable narrator of their stories when you bring them to the outside world. In reality, the prosaic truth is that much of the time you don’t even know what you don’t know.
So it is that when you sit down to read David Gillick’s terrific book The Race, you are brought into a world you thought you knew. But, of course, you didn’t. Not really.
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