TV View: Paula Radcliffe is to Britain what Sonia O'Sullivan is to Ireland. Maybe distance runners do that to nations, force them to worry about wellbeing and general health issues, draw out the nanny gene.
We fret when they're looking stressed on the track; we speculate about whether they're feeling right in the head for the big race; we second-guess them on whether they will run in the 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres or marathon. Then, when they decide, we wonder whether they have made the right choice.
BBC's coverage of the opening session of the World Athletics Championships in Helsinki was a Paula love-in. Since her spectacular collapse in the marathon at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, the plucky Brit is treated like a much-loved, valuable but highly-strung racer.
Brendan Foster, Michael Johnson, Colin Jackson and Sue Barker make up the backbone of the network's coverage. Johnson is the levelling voice. He is to the partisan BBC athletics coverage what John McEnroe is to Wimbledon. Brendan and Sue and Colin gush while Johnson analyses. Without the anachronistic, clipped moustache, Johnson has lost the military image and with it a few years. Where he is to the point, Foster rambles on.
Foster could gush for Britain. Any dead time and Foster will fill it. He's that valuable. Trust us on this one. On the opening day in Helsinki that skill is valuable. We've heard Foster talk his way through an entire marathon preview, the race and then the review. By comparison, 10,000 metres is easy, a verbal sprint.
Still with Paula making lurches to the front and then falling out the back and cutting forward again to set the pace, we might have being watching Sonia in the good old days when she had the spark and ability to shape a World Championship final.
Similarly, as Sonia occasionally failed, so too Radcliffe sinks in a sea of African and Chinese talent.
Garrulous, energetic, highly opinionated, matey and inadvertently humorous, Foster embodies the whole spectrum of commentating abilities. During the 3,000 metres steeplechase, the first for women at this level, a young athlete slipped off the top of the water jump and plunged into it up to her neck.
"She's been in at the deep end, hasn't she?" remarked Foster, referring to her inexperience. A few seconds later the chuckles arrived. Is there any end?
The BBC do athletics very well, although they might need to watch it, keep their game a bit tighter. In Radcliffe's 10,000 metres, three Ethiopian runners took off in the last lap as though it were a 400 metres sprint. Astonishingly, they ran the final lap off a world-class 10,000 pace faster than Radcliffe could run the distance if she had just stepped on to the track for one lap. As the teenage winner, Tirunesh Dibaba, celebrated with her sister Ejegayehu, who won the bronze, the BBC cameras deserted them and turned to ninth-placed Radcliffe. It was more Radcliffe than Dibaba.
Dangerously, it was also more CBS (the US network failed to show the end of the 1996 Olympic men's steeplechase, to follow an American runner in the chasing pack) than BBC.
Catching a fragment of the Test match on Saturday just before lunch, Australian spinner Shane Warne was stretching and getting all he could out of his time-worn fingers, wrist and shoulder. At 36, the overweight, blond-highlighted magician was shaping up for a hat-trick (three wickets in three successive balls). Seven Australians crowded the England batsman Andrew Flintoff as he nervously hacked out his line on the turf and looked up the wicket.
It was a scene from Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill with Uma Thurman surrounded by samurai-wielding assassins. England were 88 for six on the third day and His Plumpness was licking his lips. You can watch cricket for three days for a moment like this and while Foster might very well have been able to talk his way through it all, cricket commentary always errs on the side of reticence.
"A few fielders moving in," was how the scene was set. The batsman went on to seize the moment and play England into a chance but Warne stole the show with his mastery.
Cricket is one of those sports best watched on television. The canniness, the wrist and finger skills and the electrification of the ball by this unusually talented player, is best watched in slow motion, many times and from different angles. His badly scarred tendons, rebuilt right shoulder and misshapen spinning finger are testament to the unnatural leg break that cuts teams to pieces.
Like Radcliffe, Warne is tough too. Unlike her, we saw the best of him. From the runner that may come later - and the Beeb, no doubt, will cover every move.
