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I remember how everybody was a fan of rugby when we won that.

At least everyone had previously heard of rugby. The best instant fanbase of recent years was when we won the gold medal for curling a couple of Winter Olympics ago. All of a sudden the commentators, who sounded as if they were used to giving a 20-second bulletin at the end of the local news on BBC Radio Extreme Outermost Hebrides, had to fill three hours of prime-time BBC1. And even though essentially nobody south of Gretna had ever heard of the sport of curling in their lives before, we all lapped it up. And the next Winter Olympics, we didn't do half so well and the news coverage all stayed in the Hebrides.

I'm guilty of the same thing myself, mind: I was an insta-fan of cricket last year when the Ashes were on, although that was partly from a sense that both Warne's Australia and Flintoff's England were unusually strong teams, and that watching them clash was probably as good as cricket was ever going to get.

Peter