In Paris, the fascination is the surface

Cricketers mutter over pitches like diagnostic radiologists over an MRI. They see things we cannot. Reading the dirt is an art-inexact, of course which involves history, geography, tradition, performance theatre, meteorology, feel, imagining, and, once, the keys of Tony Greig.

- ROHIT BRIJNATH

Athletes are sensitive creatures who fuss over string tension, bat weight and the draught in a badminton hall. At the finicky upper end of sport, detail matters and I got a lecture recently from an elite swimmer on pillows and mattresses and the problem of lying on your side if you have wide shoulders. Indeed.

But it is surfaces which have fascinated us, the type of earth we play on, the material we compete on, even the pits we land on. In 1908, pole vaulters at the London Olympics discovered there was neither a sandpit nor bales of straw to break their fall. The surface adds to the degree of difficulty, requiring tiny, precise adjustments from athletes, like the bumps on a Formula One street circuit or the varied walls of a squash court.

Walls?

I was thinking about tennis' claycourt season and the idea of surfaces, so I sent out messages to athletes in other sports. Just prying open their foreign worlds. Just investigating, for instance, if the surfaces of gymnasts-the floor, the beam, the springboard-alter and in what way. Replied Lim Heem Wei, a Singaporean gymnast who has competed at the Olympics: "Each brand (of equipment) has a different touch, feel, tension, bounce, angle. Even with the same brand, the different models/series will feel different.... The age of the equipment will also make a difference to the feel of the equipment."

Then I asked the world-class squash player Saurav Ghosal about the floor of his courts, which is when he gave me a mini-education on walls.