Stefan Zweig on Sports

From The World of Yesterday

Even now, in 1941, I am highly confused as to the difference between baseball and football, hockey and polo, and the sporting page of a newspaper with its inexplicable figures seems to me to be written in Chinese. In the matter of all speed and ability records in sport, I have always been of the same opinion as the Shah of Persia who, when asked to attend the Derby, replied with Oriental wisdom: "Why? I know that one horse can run faster than another. It makes no difference to me which one it is."