Camelot a genuinely great racehorse despite defeat in the St Leger and missing out on the Triple Crown But that will not make him any less potent as a stallion. But are we deluding ourselves by adorning too many horses with greatness? After all it was not so long ago that we were feting Sea The Stars with superlatives. I do not think so. Just because Mo Farah, Bradley Wiggins and Andy Murray all produced stellar performances in the same year in no way dilutes or diminishes their achievements. Camelot has every right to be considered a great horse. He has more than justified being the un-buyable animal that a vast empire has spent years creating. Oaksey: a competitor in a million Lord Oaksey was a man in a million. As has been documented since his recent passing on, he was one of the greatest sports writers ever to grace the pages of The Daily Telegraph. My own experience of John was that he was the most competitive man I ever met in my life. Followers of Fred Winter will find that hard to believe, but they probably never saw his Lordship competing in the Oaksey village It's a Knockout competition. Teams of four had to include an "old" person (he was 5), two youths (his son Patrick and daughter Sara - both chips off the old block) and a young child. At 15 I was a long way off puberty and still in the choir - but quite strong and fast for a "10 year-old." Despite pushing the rules we never managed to win, much to the disgust of our vocal team captain. I also experienced running with John Oaksey in the 1984 London Marathon in a team raising money to save the Grand National. At the half-way point Oaksey got a bit hot and threw his tracksuit top to a policeman shouting: "Oaksey, Daily Telegraph" as we went on our way. "You'll be bloody lucky," I said. "My father gave them a pay rise once" he reassured me. Never have any trouble with them. And sure enough his tracksuit was duly delivered to the Telegraph offices. As we approached the 16-mile point fellow scribe and Corinthian Brough Scott, who had not done as much training as Oaksey, started to feel the pinch. "We had better take a pull John," I suggested. Stick together. He grimaced as he looked at his watch and then reluctantly nodded. I'm sure he spent the next 20 years guesstimating whether we could have cracked 3½ half hours. As extraordinary as Oaksey was, however, he never made the broadcasting of an Olympics his own, as Clare Balding has this summer. The Channel 4 presenter's influence is now everywhere. At the launch of my novel, Switch, in Chipping Norton on Friday, I overheard someone, who was drinking my wine, ask the book-shop owner: "Have you got Clare Balding's book, please?" Of course, she had one published on the same day.