The best sports books give a peek into the unknown

If you want to know the smell of wrestling, this is it. If you'd like to know this sport's sly cruelties, then it includes a thumb from a rival stuck into her cheek "like a fish hook." If you wish to understand how effort empties athletes, then Sakshi Malik, the Rio bronze medallist, will paint that scene, too.

- Rohit Brijnath

Menthol pain spray." If you want to know the smell of wrestling, this is it. If you'd like to know this sport's sly cruelties, then it includes a thumb from a rival stuck into her cheek "like a fish hook". If you wish to understand how effort empties athletes, then Sakshi Malik, the Rio bronze medallist, will paint that scene, too. She's just qualified for the Olympics and is retching violently into a dustbin. Nothing emerges. "My throat felt like it was peeling from the inside out." This is the poetry of pain.

We might wield tennis rackets forever, but wrestling ends when siblings get older and mattresses no longer work as mats. "I don't know anyone who wrestles for a hobby," Malik points out in her memoir Witness (2024). It's not your everyday activity and we know so little of its peculiarities, its demands, its stances, its rituals. It's why Witness, co-written by the excellent reporter Jonathan Selvaraj, must be read. It is probably the best Indian sports book I have read.

I'm drawn to Witness because every sport, often unknown to us, has a particular beat, a rhythm, a personality, an agony. In a book on Jacques Anquetil, a 1960s Tour de France cycling masochist, he talks about a perfect riding position which he won't shift from. "Simply to raise my neck for an instant to relieve the pain in the nape of my neck would cost me seconds." Greatness is part insanity.