Brazil are playing England at football at Wembley tonight, so it’s time to celebrate all the usual stuff about the beautiful game: o jogo bonito. But how beautiful is football? Sometimes very, often not at all, sometimes unapologetically ugly. And I wondered: which is the most beautiful game of all? Is it football? Or what?
Define beauty, then. Oh, for heaven’s sake: pulchra sunt quae visa placent – beauty is what pleases the sight. That old maxim will do. I’m looking for an aesthetic beauty here. Some may talk of a moral beauty in boxing, but that is beyond our remit. So is dramatic beauty; many sports offer that, in their different ways, but here we are discussing the sports that best fill the eye.
In some sports, the creation of beauty is the explicit aim of the athletes: skating, diving, synchronised swimming. These I have debarred. We are looking here for an incidental beauty, for sports in which beauty is both inescapable and inadvertent. Otherwise, it would be a battle between dressage and gymnastics for the top sport.
So I am only considering those sports in which the spectator is not presented with beauty – rather, he is beauty’s discoverer. The spectator participates in the aesthetic by finding a beauty that the athlete was never consciously seeking.
The setting is important, but not overly important. Thatched pavilions, aristocratic parks, the Henley riverside, the sailors’ sea, the golfers’ seashore, the French countryside on the Tour de France: all these have their points. But here, we must try to compare the sports themselves, not just where they take place.
The beauty of the athlete, of the movements and the attitudes, and only after that, the context – that is how we must look for the real beauty in sport. And, armed with all this, here is my list, necessarily subjective, necessarily at odds with your own.
10 Football scrapes into the top ten; because football is not often a beautiful game. When beauty does strike, it is frequently as swift and as devastating as lightning, leaving the observer gasping, the more beautiful for its rarity. But football’s beauty is intermittent and unreliable (which is, if you like, the beauty of the game).
9 There is a hypnotic beauty about fencing: classically opposed figures in white, the ancient weapons with which they fight, the light dancing as they assess each other behind masks that render every fencer faceless, every athlete an eternal abstract figure representing combat, fear, ambition. The quite impenetrable speed of the engagements only adds to their beauty.
8 The racing greyhound is a creature of startling beauty. I have known several, all of them the gentlest of dogs in private life. Racing dogs have both the homeliness of domestic dogs and the remoteness of high-performance athletes. The movement, particularly of the hurdlers, is as sublime a thing as any sport has ever produced.
7 Snooker is a kinetic sculpture, at once thrilling and calming, soporific and compelling. The play of colours – red against green, with black and white for ever both inseparable and in opposition – is a lovely thing. The long safety exchanges, often more compelling than mere breaks, have a rhythm and a sound that adds to the sumptuous play of the colours. This is sport as abstract art.
6 Regular readers of this space will know how deeply tempted I am to put eventing in the No 1 slot. The spectacle of the great equine athlete doing what he does best across as fine a stretch of parkland as can be found in this country is glorious. The moral beauty of a sport based on trust is obvious, even if inadmissible here; the dressage is also a problem. But this is as lovely a game as has ever been played.
5 Tennis gets in here for the shot-making, the body shapes, the sounds and the women. It is not, I trust, sexist to be heterosexual and thus to find a deeper beauty in the female than in the male form. There is not much in sport more delightful than the willowy grace of Maria Sharapova or the Amazonian power of Venus Williams. And if there is anything more beautiful in sport than the shot-making of Roger Federer, it is the take-that-you-hound forehand of Steffi Graf.
4 Tennis has always been a sexy sport – it was first designed for the unchaperoned mingling of the sexes. But, perhaps paradoxically, swimming is not sexy. Much of the beauty in swimming is sexless. It can be found in the almost leisurely stroke-making of Ian Thorpe, a man in love with his medium. There is a special, rather unearthly beauty about swimmers’ bodies. They hardly look human: aliens, with goggled eyes and condoms on their heads. Each possesses a perfectly sculpted physique for the task and, as a result, they look like members of a different species: Homo aquaticus, male and female alike broad of shoulder, narrow of waist and hip, long in limb and utterly remote of expression.
3 Cricket must make it, and not for the thatched pavilions alone. The ballet of white figures against green background, the way that the cover-driven ball rockets to the boundary when the batsman seems only to caress it, the loop and fizz of the spinner, the glorious run-up of the fast bowler, especially when it was Michael Holding (who even looked graceful when kicking the stumps down in temper), that long moment when everyone on the field is still save the one man, he who holds the ball in his hand. And then the response: perhaps nothing, perhaps defiance, perhaps the little death of dismissal. And at Lord’s a roar, on Tewin Green a spatter of clapping like rain falling on a chestnut tree, and one white figure leaves with bowed head and another takes his place. And the dance begins once again.
2 I remember the revelation of beauty at the Sydney Olympic Games. I was supposed to be watching Jonathan Edwards winning the triple jump; in fact, I spent most of the time watching the pole vault. The women’s event, perhaps needless to say: the mad charge, the soaring body, the arching, complicated shapes in the air, the descent, sometimes in glory, sometimes with the bar falling in chastisement. Put high jump in the same category; and, particularly when it is a women’s event, I seem to see all human aspiration in every attempt, all despair in every failure, all joy in every success; and all beauty, in every soaring body.
1 The most beautiful game of all is horse racing and to prove it, it has by far the best art (did Dufy do it best?) Humans cannot compare to a thoroughbred racehorse in beauty of appearance or of movement. Add to that the green of the grass and the harlequin shirts of the jockeys and you have a spectacle that is a joy to the beholder’s eye at the lowliest race meeting in the world. Tomorrow we have the best: the Derby will be run at Epsom and the most beautiful horse will win, because the winning post lends every horse a beauty that no other can rival.
Horse racing: o jogo mais bellissimo de todos.