By Philip Barker
ISOH member David Miller’s latest book Touching the Heart is a personal selection of 50 of the biggest sporting names of the last century. It will benefit the Starlight Foundation, a charity which helps seriously ill children in Great Britain.
Miller, previously a biographer of Seb Coe, Juan Antonio Samaranch and author of an official IOC history, has drawn on a sports writing career of over 60 years in Fleet Street with the Daily Express and The Times.
His selections are included in a book which explores “why sport is important.”
Miller features many who made their international reputations at the Olympic Games.
In the course of his career, the author met Jesse Owens and Muhammad Ali who feature to reflect the philosophy of the book that “sport is above race creed politics and geography.”
Fanny Blankers-Koen, Mary Peters and Jessica Ennis-Hill lead the female roll call. Women were not always as well represented at the Olympics.
1984 gold medallist Jayne Torvill is also included alongside her ice dance partner Christopher Dean.
In his career as journalist, Miller attended 24 Olympic Games and 14 World Cups.
Manchester United and England striker Marcus Rashford has written the foreword in which he reflected on his own experience.
‘’The ball provided a way out of difficulty, not just for me but for my family. Football offers a sense of belonging. For me football is the common language we all can speak.”
Miller’s selections also include many outside the Olympic world. African American boxer Jack Johnson, who overcame fierce discrimination in the United States to become heavyweight champion of the world before the first world war, is a particularly timely inclusion in 2021.
“While sport exhibits triumphalism, the author covets style,” say the publishers.
Thus Sir Stanley Matthews sits alongside Lionel Messi in this pantheon of the great. The author saw both of them play, lucky man!
All profits and royalties from the book will go to the Starlight Foundation which “uses the power of play to make the experience of illness and treatment better for children and their families and create a sense of escape from the difficult reality in which these children find themselves.”
The book is due for publication in the USA in January 2022.
Touching the Heart – Why Sport Matters
Pitch Publishing
£16.99
ISBN: 9781801500128
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