Jon Day

Matthew McNaught was, and to a certain extent still is, drawn to the homespun, anti-institutional community he found in the church. Immanuel, as he describes it, was fire and brimstone, but it was also ‘the sound of around a hundred people singing more or less in tune. It was baptisms in the River Itchen, picnics on the South Downs, praying in tongues in suburban living rooms.’

When​ Possessed, Rebecca Falkoff’s cultural history of hoarding, came through the letter box, I put it on my desk next to a pile of other books, a tangle of wires left out after an unsuccessful search for a phone charger, a small pocket microscope, a broken reading light, a carrier bag full of travel adapters, a sheaf of loose papers, a selection of penknives, a pair of speakers, the...

Grigory Rodchenkov’s first-hand knowledge of doping made him relatively unusual in the world of anti-doping – he often already possessed personal samples of some of the rarer drugs his lab wanted to detect, which were then used to calibrate their machinery. At first he worked directly for the state. To cover for positive tests, dirty samples would be made to disappear or left in such a way that they spoiled. Some were swapped with clean samples provided by coaches, friends or relatives of the athletes. So much doping went on that ‘in some training camps, finding clean urine was a problem ... The coaches were drinking gallons of water and emptying their bladders into their athlete’s sample bottles.’ To make the clean samples match the colour of the dirty ones, Rodchenkov and his colleagues added Nescafé granules. His grandest project – the one which eventually did for him – took place during the 2014 Sochi winter games, the first Olympics to be held on Russian soil since Moscow in 1980. Sochi was to be the ‘glittering jewel’ in Putin’s crown and Rodchenkov was under pressure to produce winners.

You​ can divide most sports into those that take place in the real world (road cycling, sailing, cross country running) and those that are played on the artificial space of a court or pitch. Some (golf, croquet) occupy an uncertain middle ground, which may be one of the reasons they are so tedious to watch. Others (football, rugby) started as the former and, as they were codified, became...