Short stories about music and sport and politics and the world.
Given what they were about to do, four men that looked less like identical mountainsides than they really should, sat in two identical boats, ill suited to anything other than flying across still water at great speed. Neither pair looked at the other. They didn’t have to. The Pimenows were as aware of the Landvoigts …
Continue reading “The Pimenow’s and the Landvoigt’s Brothers”
He wished he could be in control of his own destiny. But Jürgen May, one of the fastest men in the world, was utterly powerless. His life in the hands of a guy he barely knew. Wedged L shaped into the hollowed out cavity of a ludicrous American car. Preying that the border guards wouldn’t …
Helmut Recknagel never said what it was that made him go back home to Thuringia from a cold, bright day in Bavaria in January, 1956. He’d been jumping off mountains for half his life. He’d grown up in the looming shadow of Germany’s first ever ski-jumping slope. And this was his first big chance to …
Carl Lewis hadn’t lost a long-jump competition in ten years. He had won 65 in a row. His run-up was a study in technical perfection. His head still, his hands flattened, cutting through the air in high sweeps to his left and right. He rarely looked at the board as he hit it. He didn’t …
Claudia Pechstein’s hair was platinum blonde when I met her. Cut just above the shoulder. Her jaw was certain, her eyes a piercing sapphire blue. She looked like a policewoman, which she was, and is of course. She looked like any one of the hundreds of them that fill the ludicrous looking Estrel hotel near …
Jacob Sweetman 