Afternoon:
10°c
Some authors could give Olympic athletes a good run for their money. The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has notched up an impressive 32 marathons since he took up the sport in 1982.
His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is a paean to jogging. "Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life," he says.
Writers have long been obsessed with sport. Albert Camus was soccer-mad and played in goal for Algiers University in the Twenties, which no doubt shaped his own semi-detached attitude to life.
"I quickly learned that the ball never came to you where you expected it," he said. "This helped me in life, above all in the metropolis, where people are not always wholly straightforward."
PG Wodehouse preferred a more sedate round of golf but became so besotted with the game he set many of his stories on the putting green. "Golf, like the measles, should be caught young," said Plum, " for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious." It takes a genius like Wodehouse to make golf seem vaguely interesting.
Perhaps the best known fictional sporting hero in modern literature is the rebellious teenager with a talent for running in Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. During a crosscountry meet which he is winning, he stops short of the finish line to defy the authorities. In typically British fashion he snatches a moral victory from the jaws of self-defeat.
Sport is also one of the great themes of the American novel. Ernest Hemingway wrote about bull-fighting, hunting and fishing (Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa and The Old Man and the Sea).
Don DeLillo's End Zone is an allegory about American football, war and destruction and one of his later novels, Underworld, is a great love song to baseball.
Philip Roth's The Great American Novel is about a homeless baseball team, while Richard Ford's Independence Day features a sportswriter as its hero.
Harry Angstrom, the hero of John Updike's Rabbit books, is the star of a college basketball team whose best days are behind him. Even the favourite to win this year's Booker prize, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, is about one man's quixotic attempt to introduce cricket to America.
Many of these are not simply sports novels but are an elegy to lost youth. Given that writers are so competitive, it is perhaps not so surprising that they are drawn to the sporting arena.
What is more surprising is that nobody has written a great Olympian novel. Yet.
