Compiled by NIALL KIELY

Nero also tried to fiddle chariot races

CLASSICS graduate Jonathan Evans recently and interestingly harked back to Rome's heyday for parallels with modern espionage. His credentials, as director general of MI5, can be taken on trust.

He wrote in a magazine promoting the teaching of Latin in Britain’s state schools that a modern intelligence-gatherer could have no better preparation than a grounding in classics: all societies have always needed to protect themselves against internal and external threats, and the Greeks and Romans were well versed in spying.

Caesar was, however, famously inadequate at organising or interpreting intelligence, preferring to rely on a supremely disciplined army and monumental defences, and it was not until the second century AD the frumentarii were organised.

Originally a cadre that organised grain logistics, they evolved into the loathed, spying footsoldiers of the Stasi of their time.

Which brings us circuitously to Gaius Appelieus Diocles, second century AD sporting superstar, a charioteer who made more than 35 million sestercii in prize money as a charioteer in the Circus Maximus.

Peter Struck, a US researcher, wrote recently in Lapham’s Quarterly that such a sum would equate with some $15 billion today.

Diocles, from Lusitania (modern Portugal), is thought to have been illiterate and debuted aged 18. He moved in the

limited Circus transfer market from the White team, via a short stint with the Greens, to huge success with the Reds, from which franchise he retired in his 43rd year.

The Green charioteering team had one fanatical and imperial supporter, Nero. He took his obsession with the sport to the extreme of postponing the 211th Olympiad for a couple of years while he trained for the tethrippon, or ten-horse chariot event. It didn’t work.

The useless Nero failed to finish in the 67 AD games, despite repeated cheating, when he fell off his state-of-the-art vehicle, but set himself up as judge and jury on an appeal that declared him the winner anyway. Oh, and he also gave himself victory in a variety of artistic and musical events that he had created himself by imperial diktat.

The following year, Nero topped himself and the International Olympic Committee of its day declared the 211th Olympiad void, formally removing his name from the records. Classic.

Racing folk simply not at the races anymore

RACING’S in trouble. And could end up spatchcocked.

Attendances are down everywhere, with fitful exceptions. It’s an expensive day out on most courses, people have less time to do it and have lower disposable incomes anyway.

The recession has been hard on many of the businesses that sponsored races, and company failures have drained stables of owners with ready cash: you can hardly give away horses right now.

Horse racing’s always funded itself substantially through money from the betting industry, that parasite on society.

And racing has always maintained a specious arm’s-length distance from gambling, one of society’s great cancers.

Online betting from home has been a particular disaster for people who couldn’t or wouldn’t bring themselves to attend grubby dog-tracks or – heaven forfend! – sit slotting coins and pumping one-armed bandits in seedy settings.

But by the early Noughties, the typical profile of a new problem gambler in Britain had become online, middle-aged, middle class – and female.

Addiction treatment centres even had to build residential accommodation for women gamblers. And have you noticed the burgeoning ubiquity of online betting names now sponsoring sports clubs?

Watch the variety of national provenances among Champions League teams that now boast the names of internet betting firms on their shirts.

Racing’s been finding it hard to mulct its moiety from those offshore entities, and in Britain the British Horseracing Authority has been slashing a 1,500-meeting fixtures list to reflect the much reduced take in its income.

Plumpton’s a pithy case in point. The east Sussex jumps track, down more than £100,000 in its annual BHA funding, last month hosted its first meeting after the summer break but also became a drive-in cinema, showing Mamma Mia! on what is claimed to be the largest outdoor screen in Europe.

But some in racing still don’t get it. Last weekend, having finally landed the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, trainer Michael Stoute did not even try and veil his contempt for racing journalists.

He’s got form, too, and the man clearly couldn’t care less about communicating with the wider horse-racing public.

I’ll give you one guess what the cloth-eared eminences of the BHA will do about the Stoute one.

Aviva experience less than perfect

LAST weekends Aviva experience at the Leinster-Munster game prompted some deservedly critical comments about practicalities at the new Lansdowne stadium.

In sum . . . The noise from the tannoy was overwhelming and was not improved by the inane puerilities of the announcer’s script.

The idiotic pre-kick-off smoke effect lingered on a windless night for an irritating 10 minutes.

A blackout for the laser-show at the final whistle was at best poorly conceived.

Getting out was slow and the crowd-crush on Lansdowne Road and at the Dart crossing smacked of a serious incident waiting to happen.

More trivially, when entry and egress to gents toilets are through the same door, long delays are inevitable; and tight bladders + thirst for pints = short tempers + angry punters.

The only light relief came from one frustrated queuer, who like many got close to the counter only to find yet another keg was empty, but first told me a story doing the rounds in London.

Seems Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary ordered a pint of Guinness in a bar and was surprised to be charged only one euro. “Very competitive tariff,” said Micko, approvingly. “Thanks, Mr O’Leary,” replied the barman. “And will you be needing a glass with your Guinness as well?”

College days with Moss the mighty

UCC was a cosy university in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Small student numbers clustered on the one site between the College and Western roads, bound by the old Cork gaol wall and Donovan’s Hill. And virtually all sport happened down the Mardyke. where rugby/soccer, Gaelic and hockey pitches sat comfortably beside each other.

Sport was writ large in College life. Passions were catholic: soccer players travelled to Fitzgibbons, basketballers went to Collingwoods; anyone might surface at signal rugby games.

Innocent, perhaps closeted days. The North smouldered, then exploded, but seemed a long way distant. Apartheid loomed at least as large as discrimination up North as an issue in the Rest, where we drank copious pots of tea, played poker for student grants-stakes and did the Simplex for speed. Student politicians tended more towards vapid sparkler than rabid firebrand.

There were “outsiders”, but the bulk of the student body came from Cork city and county, bolstered by goodly numbers of Kerry and Limerick folk. Quite a bit of the Sigerson team’s quality came from Kerry boys like Mick Morris, and the brothers Geaney and Lynch. And we had a full back in the old-fashioned, They Shall Not Pass mould: Moss Keane from Currow.

Deceptively bright, a first-class honours student at a time before grade inflation, he also was tremendously and unpretentiously cheerful fun.

A doubtless apocryphal tale went the rounds of the Rest once, saying that Mossie had just greeted a pal in fluent Japanese: “O’Hara, ’oo hoor, ’oo, how are ’oo? (say it swiftly). I thought Moss’d bust a gut laughing when he was told.

All sports coalesced in the Nunan Cup, an annual inter-faculty brawl-with-brains deliberately scheduled for muddy mid-winter and played in the mid-campus Quarry.

One “sideline” was a jagged wall with ragged foliage, the other a raised footpath. The “game” had local rules, a combination of rugby and faction-fight, and balls kicked against the wall were deemed to bounce back into play. It was tremendous, mullacking fun to watch and play.

The game might’ve been designed for one Maurice Ignatius Keane, and dairy science thrived in the Quarry, backboned by Mossie and other raw-boned country fellas who were also as glic as university days were long.

I reckon it was the sheer muddy joy of the Nunan that first sparked Moss Keane’s interest in rugby. The second spur was the birth of Starry’s versus Ludgate’s.

The two main UCC drinking holes were the Western Star, near the ’Dyke and owned by ex-Cork Con hooker Derry “Starry” Crowley, and Bill Ludgate’s, off Gillabbey Rock, largely frequented by GAA players.

It was like the Nunan minus the Quarry wall. Compromise rules ensured the Star team couldn’t scrummage (“leaning in”, like Rugby League players), but the Ludgate lads had to learn to tackle (although “apologetically” pulling a man down was second nature, anyway, to Kerry natives!). From very distant memory, the first game was played in a downpour on a gluepot back-pitch down the Mardyke and was won by a drop-goal from the half-way line, kicked by the Ludgate’s outhalf: one Billy Morgan.

At the heart of the GAA pack that afternoon was Moss Keane. Giant, gentle, generous Mossie. Some man. RIP.

Tevez and the diva

AND finally . . . Caroline Aherne’s TV interlocutor character, Mrs Merton, once famously asked a former model the exquisite question: “So, Debbie McGee, what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?”

Similar sniggers reach us from Argentina, where the popular press has been reporting on a series of “love lockdowns” in hotels featuring Manchester City’s Carlos Tevez and actress Brenda Aznicar.

She has responded indignantly to suggestions that she might be a gold-digger. “We fit,” she has said. “I am a diva, and he is a footballer. He is a beauty, too.”