The Olympics are coming. And, as with marriages and funerals, every fresh Olympics carries with it the memories of Olympics past.

The publication of Heat of the Moment (Wiley, £14.99), which is edited by The Sunday Times sports writer Andrew Longmore, celebrates the Olympic and Paralympic Movement by re-telling 25 "extraordinary stories" from the modern Games.

Each of these essays, by some of Britain's leading sportswriters, has at its centre an imperishable aspect of Olympic history; but each also provides context and detail which enrich the essential element.

Many sports followers will have a memory, for instance, of David Hemery's 400 metre hurdles win at the 1968 Mexico Games in a world record time of 48.12sec.

My own strong recollection is of watching the race on TV and then being obscurely irritated at the warmth of interest the winner generated in my mother, who was not generally a great sports enthusiast. I saw a Briton winning in a world record time, but as a child who two years earlier had watched England's footballers win the World Cup on that same television screen, I was still under the impression that this was what happened when Englishmen went out to play.

My mum, I can now fully appreciate, was responding in a womanly fashion to a tall, well-spoken, handsome Corinthian whose modesty in his post-race interview - manly chest still heaving, lock of blond hair drifting down his faintly sweated brow - was simply one more expression of his perfection. Then again, she was a bit the same way about John Newcombe, and he was an Australian...

But I digress.

In describing Hemery's marvellous moment, the Daily Mail's Neil Wilson starts by recalling the exact words used in the accompanying BBC commentary by David Coleman, words with which the deed are inextricably bound for all but the lucky few who witnessed the race at first hand:

"Hemery leads...it's Hemery, Great Britain. It's Hemery, Great Britain...And David Hemery's going to take the gold. David Hemery wins for Britain. In second place is Hennige. And who cares who's third? It doesn't matter...Hemery won that from start to finish. He killed the rest. He paralysed them."

And of course Coleman was soon apologising for his unwitting slight on Britain's other finalist, John Sherwood, who won the bronze...

Wilson describes Hemery's victory as "one of the greatest performances in an Olympic Games by a Briton."

But the apparent ease was deceptive, as Wilson also makes clear when he relates that our breezy Corinthian, who was based in the United States, had been slogging his guts out on the sand dunes of the Massachusetts coast, and had walked each of the eight lanes in the Estadio Olímpico on every evening for two weeks before the race, visualising himself winning from each position - and always in a world record.


There are many riches packed into this book. Britain's joyful hockey gold of 1988 is joyfully recalled by Barry Davies, another whose BBC commentary is forever linked with the recollections of a glorious victory. "Where are the Germans?" asked Davies, after Imran Sherwani had effectively settled matters with a breakaway third goal, before adding: "But frankly, who cares?"

Longmore offers a characteristically poised account of the climactic eight days of Tanni Grey-Thompson's Paralympic career in Athens 2004, during which she became the record-breaking holder of a tenth and eleventh gold in the 100 and 400m respectively. "She didn't do a lap of honour," Longmore writes. "She barely had enough strength left to push herself over the line."

Brendan Gallagher, of the Daily Telegraph, brilliantly evokes the fearsome endurance and technical precision which Britain's team pursuit cyclists demonstrated in their victory at the Beijing 2008 Games - "In smooth motion, the British team resembled a runaway train rattling down the track. Four carriages moving as one, linked by imaginary couplers. Lean together, move together, think together, win together...this train was on auto-pilot."

Not that this book is an exercise in British cheerleading. David Miller, with more than half a century of sport writing experience, ruminates interestingly on the claim of the Hungarian footballers who won gold at the 1952 Helsinki Games and went on to dominate the world game to be regarded as the greatest team ever. "This was not just the first flowering of a brilliant generation of players from an unknown, oppressed nation, but also the introduction of a new footballing ideology," Miller writes.

Tom Knight, the former Daily Telegraph writer who has covered eight Olympics, recalls the exact details of the Opening Ceremony that Nearly Went Wrong at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where Cathy Freeman - who was to deliver the gold all Australia craved eleven nights later - waited, freezing, for four minutes as a technical hitch threatened to halt the progress of the Olympic flame on its route to the cauldron.


Of all the stories, however, perhaps the one which resonates most truly with everything the Olympics aspires to mean is the recollection of the fellowship between Jesse Owens - featured on the front cover of the book - and the man whom he beat to the long jump gold at the 1936 Berlin Games, Luz Long.

Craig Lord presents a densely layered appreciation of how, despite the dark and foreboding influence on these Olympics and the presence in the stands of an impatiently expectant Fuhrer, Germany's model of an Aryan sportsman showed himself to be the model of a human as he made a point of advising and befriending an American opponent who was, according to the prevailing Nazi ideology, no more than a "black auxiliary".

Lord quotes in full the letter Long wrote in 1942, shortly before he died of his wounds during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. It makes clear, as well as any other words written, the transcendent possibilities that sport offers to mankind:

"My dear friend Jesse, my heart is telling me that this is perhaps the last letter I will ever write. If that's the case, I beg one thing of you: when the war is over, please go to Germany, find my son Kai and tell him about his father. Tell him about the times when war did not separate us and tell him that things can be different between men in this world. Your brother, Luz."

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here.