Note to Singapore athletes: Write a book, please

Around 40,000 feet is a wonderful place to get an education. The plane is quiet, the phone never rings, the concentration is fierce.

- Rohit Brijnath

And in this pressurised cabin I can feel a wrestler's pain.

"When she got me in a headlock, she'd stick her thumb into my cheek, like a fish hook."

If I like something in a book, I mark the paragraph or dog-ear the page. Think of it as an act of remembrance. And Witness, the autobiography of Sakshi Malik, an Indian Olympic bronze-medal winning wrestler, co-written by journalist Jonathan Selvaraj, results in my black pen scratching furiously across the pages.

This isn't travelogue fluff about Olympic selfies, this is raw insight. Like Malik unable to breathe after a strenuous bout in which she qualifies for the Olympics. Her coach holds her over a dustbin as she retches but nothing emerges.

"My throat felt as if it was peeling from the inside out."

How much does sport hurt, how much does going to a Games matter, how much do athletes give of themselves? Bit by bit, if we're lucky, an athlete peels away the superficial skin and lets us look at their insides. How does defeat steal their confidence? What happens in a dressing room?

Or what insanity infects tribes?

In his masterful book The Impossible Climb, Mark Synnott describes a chat with two South African climbers. Whiskey, he writes, is passed around till "a giant beetle landed in the dirt in front of one of the South Africans. He promptly snatched it up and popped it into his mouth".