How a decade’s tales of the unexpected added to sport’s storybook endings

From Tiger’s comeback at Augusta to the Foxes’ title miracle, Lawrence Ostlere recalls how the drama of the past decade copperfastened sport’s capacity for pure escapism

Moments of ecstacy: (clockwise from centre) Tiger Woods, Leicester City, Jess Ennis, Jos Buttler and Andy Murray (Getty)

There are certain sports mega-events which shaped the past 10 years, each one a heavy footprint in history. This was a decade of discovery, when the Fifa World Cup was staged in Africa, the Olympic Games finally returned to London and the Rugby World Cup arrived in Asia, to the bemusement of most locals. Yet despite these ever more spectacular settings, it is a series of unscripted moments which stick in the memory.

When we look back we are drawn to glimpses in time. The final hour at Medinah Country Club, as the evening light faded and a Ryder Cup miracle unravelled. Forty-six golden minutes when triangles of light twinkled over Hackney, and Mo Farah, Jess Ennis and Greg Rutherford delivered the night of their lives all at once. The eternal pause at Lord’s as Jason Roy ran and stooped and picked and threw, and Jos Buttler knocked off the bails, and delirium ensued. If this decade taught us anything about sport, it is that however lavish the stage, those small but seismic instants of human drama are the parts that truly last.

The sporting landscape has changed quicker than ever before. Sport is a product of society and in the decade of the smartphone, of instant gratification at our fingertips, it has tried to cater for new expectations, with mixed results. Things happen faster now. You see it in cricket’s shrinking formats, in athletics’ streamlined Diamond League, even in snooker, a game once played with whisky and a cigarette now being rushed to the tick of a timer. Technology has found solutions, like Hawk-Eye’s successful integration in tennis, but it has met problems too: in football VAR has unearthed stray offside armpits and imperceptible handballs, sins we never knew existed. And when Eliud Kipchoge broke through the two-hour marathon barrier, he did it with an extra bounce in his Nike shoes; scientific advances have brought moral dilemmas as well as practical ones.