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Jessica Ennis, though, does choose the historic present in Unbelievable, to set the scene at her Olympic performance. ‘This is my one opportunity. My one shot,’ she writes, adding (in case we don’t catch her drift), ‘This is it. This is my chance. I cannot help thinking that if it goes wrong I will never get this opportunity again.’
‘I have butterflies and feel a rush of adrenalin,’ writes Tom Daley, firmly in the present, on the diving board at the beginning of My Story. Adrenalin is familiar to Victoria Pendleton, too, who finds it ‘courses through’ her on more than one occasion, though sometimes it is ‘spiking’. Jessica Ennis prefers to spell this hormone ‘adrenaline’, and she describes it as a rush, a buzz. The distinction between –in and –ine suffixes for chemicals is in a fine old mess, despite efforts by the Chemical Society, under the influence of its president, August Hofmann, to tidy it up in the 1860s. To complicate matters, Adrenalin is a proprietary name in the United States.
Fabrice Muamba also uses ‘adrenaline’ in a half-metaphorical way, talking of a dressing-room being ‘all ointments and sticky tape, noise and adrenaline’. But later in his book, I’m Still Standing, he is literally being administered adrenaline ‘in the hope that it will be enough to get my heart working again’, for he is the footballer who, as well as triumphing against adversity (arriving in east London aged 11 unable to speak English but gaining three A-levels in English, French and mathematics), has the unrivalled record of surviving his heart having stopped for 78 minutes, during a match at White Hart Lane.
‘Bang! Everything goes dead mad, dead quick,’ Wayne Rooney begins his latest volume of memoirs, using ‘dead’ as an intensive. The usage is older than one might imagine. ‘Dead slow’ is found in the 16th century and, in 1590, in An Almond for a Parrot, chattering Thomas Nashe wrote of being ‘dead sure at a catechisme’.
Mr Rooney, an assiduous author, who in 2006 signed a £5 million deal for five books over 12 years, has now brought out My Decade in the Premier League, which begins with an analysis of the adrenal feeling of scoring a goal. ‘It’s a high — a mad rush of power,’ he writes, ‘huge, selfish, nuts. I reckon if I could bottle the buzz, I’d be able to make the best energy drink ever.’ That was precisely what they were pumping into poor Fabrice Muamba.
‘After a cardiac arrest,’ Mr Muamba explains, ‘you can carry on breathing for a short while without any heartbeat as your body continues to try and operate as normal.’ One can see the difficulty. But it struck me how far from ‘normal’ these sporting champions were, in public or private.
‘Normal’ is a fairly new word. In the sense ‘ordinary’ it has, so the compilers of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary noted in 1907, been ‘common since c. 1840’. From the 1880s, a sense emerged of ‘physically and mentally sound’. Sigmund Freud came up with the noun Normalen (‘normals’), to mean ‘heterosexuals’, and Abraham Brill introduced this noun ‘normal’ into English in translating works such as The Interpretation of Dreams (1913) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1914). This last meaning is not found in any of the memoirs discussed here.
Jessica Ennis often refers to the ‘normal’. As a ‘normal girl’, she had to ‘choose between athletics and a normal teenage party-going lifestyle’. She was once a ‘small girl in Sheffield, dealing with bullies and normal teenage insecurities’. Her childhood sounds horrible to me, always being picked on, fighting with her sister, with her mother (who had run away from home herself as a teenager) saying to her ‘I’m sure you are adopted’ (which she isn’t).
Victoria Pendleton often felt the desire to leave the cycle track to ‘be normal again’, ‘to have a normal life’. But then, ‘dreaming of being chased by a killer was normal for me’. She experienced cruelty from rivals and trainers, and yearned as a girl for her father’s love. Bradley Wiggins declared in an earlier autobiography that it was impossible for him to have ‘anything like a normal father-son relationship’ with his own father.
Today, a most successful genre in bookshops is the misery memoir. Do all teenagers now feel miserable and so seek fellow-sufferers in books? Or is a kind of catharsis induced by reading of lives that are utterly unlike their own? In either case, I’m not at all sure that young people should take sports champions as role models. The phrase ‘role model’ first appeared in the 1940s, meaning ‘guide to how a task is to be carried out’. Its modern meaning of ‘a person to be imitated as an example’ appeared first in 1947, in the journal Psychiatry. I have certainly bought no sporting memoirs as Christmas presents.
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