MOTOR SPORT: Barry Sheene was one of those legendary figures who was considered by his devotees to be the world champion long before he won the title - and long after he had lost it.
He raced motorcycles for 16 years and won the sport's most prestigious title, the 500cc world championship, in 1976 and 1977. But by the time he unzipped his racing leathers for the last time in 1984 he had become far more feted as a gossip-column luminary than a motorcycle racer.
He was a hit on television's Celebrity Squares, a regular on Blue Peter; he holidayed with George Harrison, dined with Michael Caine, and made a second fortune advertising aftershave with his fellow Londoner Henry Cooper.
And he forever remained the most engaging and approachable of men. Sheene was not half a bad name for a charmingly bright and always chirpily positive fellow.
The last time I came across him was 10 years ago to the month, on Australia's Gold Coast when Nigel Mansell won an Indycar event in Queensland. As the Fleet Street scrum was jostling around the winner, the whisper suddenly came that Sheene was talking in another area of the pitlane - and, as one, like locusts aware of more vibrant and tasty copy, the pack left the bemused Brummie driver rabbiting to thin air as they beat a path to the (still) more famous old racing hero of vroom and fume.
Sheene had retired to the dry, sun-blessed Australian coast as antidote to the arthritis that affected many of the bones he had broken.
"In England, the only serious job I could have done was as a weather-forecaster - predicting rain or damp on the way because all my aches and pains were beginning to play up."
Mind you, he had announced that emigration cheerfully enough back in the 1980s as he sat, dandling his baby daughter, with his feet up in the baronial sitting room of his sensational 33-bedroom Elizabethan manor in Sussex. Through the leaded windows, a Mercedes and a Rolls stood sentry; beyond, a helicopter was on the pad.
Yet only a year later he won the world championship; in 1977 he retained it - only to be the centre of a hooha when some of the sport's olde-tyme adventurers berated him as a funk for opting out of the "lottery of life" which was the Isle of Man TT's switchback.
He told me perkily: "I don't give a damn. If they say I'm a coward, then I'm a coward - but at least I'm an alive-and-well coward, and that's how I intend to remain."
At his best his racing fumes had the whiff of genuine and unforgettable drama, and they would linger for a long time - as they always did when the incomparable young Sheene was shining.
Guardian Service
