SPECTATOR SPORT
Great expectations
Simon Barnes
OF COURSE we don't actually believe it, but belief is not necessary. Potential is greater, nobler, more beautiful, more exhil- arating than mere achievement. Potential is infinite: there are limits to achievement.
So we reach the high point in the sum- mer of sport by celebrating a festival of potential, a festival of youth. First Michael Owen, the 18-year-old footballer who scored England's great goal of the World Cup, and then, last weekend, a golfer too young to buy a legal drink fmishing fourth in the Open.
Justin Rose played his last shot of the competition with a sand wedge from the rough. It towered, landed, and by a suitable miracle scuttled into its burrow. Rose, his face intermittently strained like an old man, lit up in a great goofy grin, a boy again.
Some people have said that Owen and Rose will surely become the greatest stars of their generation, that there is nothing they cannot achieve, that they have the tal- ent and the temperament. To think about what they might achieve is to miss the point.
The point is the savouring of infinite pos- sibilities. A drawing by Leonardo is greater than a painting because of the drawing's greater possibilities. The week before the Derby, horsy business took me to Newmar- ket to watch the horses work with Sheikh Mohammed, the world's richest and most fanatical owner of racehorses.
I blurted out something of that senti- ment: that it was better standing here on the Albahatri gallop waiting for the string to go by, to feel the morning chill and the pre-race potential, than it was to be at Epsom on Derby day. This was what racing, what sport was all about: the morning of infinite possibilities, rather than the evening of achievement.
Sheikh Mohammed, with sudden and rather surprising enthusiasm, agreed. But he is a horseman through and through, and familiar with its joyful moments of anticipa- tion. 'There are no surprises in racing,' Michael Stoute, the trainer, once said, 'only disappointments.' Every year, racing gets excited about the Horse of the Century, and those who fail to get excited about horses — the sensible part of the population — think this is very silly, because everybody knows the horse that is supposed to be so great will almost certainly get beaten, and become just one more disappointment.
But you don't have to believe. The latest wonder horse candidate almost certainly won't be Pegasus come again. But what if it was? Thus this year we had Xaar beaten and King of King's beaten and Cape Verdi beaten. Now we have Royal Anthem, who runs in the King George this weekend. This one really is the Horse of the Century — till tea-time on Saturday, probably. But perhaps not. What if?
When Tiger Woods, golfs pre-eminent boy wonder, first appeared, people expect- ed him to win every tournament in sight. Woods has instead revealed to us his tal- ent, his humanity, his fallibility. But that moment when he won his first US Masters by a million miles he was a boy of infinite possibilities, every one of them worth savouring. So let us savour the possibili- ties of the budding Rose, rather than wish his life away in a heap of expectations. Summer's lease hath all too short a date.
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