Still 'My Time' for Bradley as book sales continue with no sign of slowing down

Cycling knight Sir Bradley Wiggins is continuing to provide the sports book market with a shot in the arm, even in the traditionally quiet period at the start of a new year.

The Wiggins autobiography, My Time, published by Yellow Jersey, was last year's Christmas hit by a massive margin, the fastest sports biography to clock up 200,000 sales since David Beckham's My Side in 2003.

But where other books that caught the reading public's imagination in the run-up to Christmas have tailed off a little, sales of the Wiggins story have kept on growing.

Nielsen BookScan had recorded almost 229,000 copies of My Time sold by the end of 2012 and another 11,000 have been added in the first month of 2013.  With renewed interest in Wiggins' two previous autobiographies, the Tour de France winner and Olympic gold medallist has sold 278,000 books since the close of London 2012.

This compares with a modest post-Christmas increase from 63,000 copies sold to 67,000 for Jessica Ennis's post-Olympic memoir Unbelievable: and an extra 2,000 copies for Victoria Pendleton's Between the Lines.

An analysis by The Times newspaper suggests Wiggins could earn £1.2 million on the back of his success, although that figure is dwarfed by the potential earnings Ennis can anticipate.

The heptathlete has been described as a 'sponsor's dream', combining good looks with a charming personality.  She has signed contracts with adidas and Pruhealth reportedly worth £450,000 a year and further deals could net her as much as £3.5 million, according to The Times.

Distance runner Mo Farah has endorsement deals with Virgin Media worth £500,000 and with Nike worth £430,000, which the analysis reckons will add up to £3 million earnings directly attributable to his two Olympic golds.

However, a Farah life story has been put on hold for the moment, although his representatives have denied a story that they were unimpressed with the size of advances offered.  They say they want it to be well researched and well written and that it will be released later this year, or in 2014.


My Time: An Autobiography , by Bradley Wiggins
Unbelievable: From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold, by Jessica Ennis
Between the Lines: My Autobiography, by Victoria Pendelton

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The Wiggins effect - Bradley's the new Beckham as My Time flies off the shelves

Tour de France winner, Olympic time-trial champion, BBC Sports Personality of the Year -- not to mention the small matter of a knighthood -- Bradley Wiggins swept all before him in 2012.

It might not come as a major surprise, therefore, that the Wiggins autobiography, My Time, blew the opposition completely off the track in book sales for 2012.

Published by Random House under the Yellow Jersey imprint, My Time did not appear in the bookstores until November 8 yet end-of-year sales figures compiled by Nielsen BookScan were almost 230,000, most of those rung up in the six weeks or so leading up to Christmas.

To put that number in perspective, My Time's sales accounted for almost a quarter of sales for the whole sports autobiography sector in 2012.  Indeed, if the resurgence in sales enjoyed by the earlier Wiggins life story, In Pursuit of Glory, is taken into account, Britain's all-time greatest cyclist cornered more than a quarter of that market.

According to Nielsen, only five sports autobiographies have sold more copies all told than My Time since they began collating statistics from book retailers in 1988.  That list is headed with more than half a million copies sold by the David Beckham autobiography My Side, which stormed the Christmas market in 2003.

My Side is the only title to have passed the 200,000 mark faster than My Time, which is another indication of the impact Wiggins has made with the British public.

Some critics have argued that My Time lacks depth and emotion compared with In Pursuit of Glory but speed of production was always going to be a critical issue as publishers sought to ride the Olympic wave and William Fotheringham, the cycling journalist and author who helped Wiggins turn his reflections into words on a page, should be applauded for meeting what must have been a daunting deadline.

The same can be said of Rick Broadbent, the athletics writer entrusted with ghosting the Jessica Ennis autobiography, which also took advantage of the book-buying public's appetite for reliving the highs of London 2012.

Unbelievable, released by Hodder and Stoughton on the same day as the Wiggins memoir and Seb Coe's autobiograpphy, also from Hodder, overtook Tom Daley's My Story as the second most popular sports biography but the golden girl of the heptathlon still did not come close to Wiggins, with almost four copies of My Time sold for every one of the Ennis tale.

Coe's book, Running My Life, nudged ahead of William Hill Sports Book of the Year winner The Secret Race as the fourth biggest seller of 2012 in the biography section.  Indeed, with In Pursuit of Glory's figures placing it 10th on the list and Victoria Pendleton's Between the Lines in seventh, six of the top 10 had an Olympic theme.

My Time: An Autobiography, by Bradley Wiggins
Unbelievable: From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold, by Jessica Ennis
My Story, by Tom Daley
Running My Life - The Autobiography, by Seb Coe
The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle
Between the Lines: My Autobiography, by Victoria Pendleton
In Pursuit of Glory: The Autobiography, by Bradley Wiggins

Click on the links for more information or to buy.

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The best sports books of 2012 -- a Sports Bookshelf selection

As we welcome 2013 and a whole new raft of sports literature, time to reflect on the best of 2012, or at least those that appealed most to The Sports Bookshelf.

Not surprisingly, the short and longlists from the William Hill Sports Book of the Year awards are well represented, most prominently by the winner of that prize, the extraordinary exposé of chemical cheating that helped bring down one of sport's biggest names in the cyclist Lance Armstrong.

In the words of the judges, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France won the William Hill prize for self-confessed doper Tyler Hamilton because it 'fundamentally changed the sport it described' but it stands as a great read, too, irrespective of the impact of its content.

Skilfully crafted by the journalist Daniel Coyle, Hamilton's account of his time alongside Armstrong in the US Postal Team has the style and suspense of an espionage novel as Hamilton, who was right at the heart of the most sophisticated and long-running programme of organised dishonesty in the history of all sports, describes the extraordinary life of subterfuge that Armstrong and his cohort pursued to put themselves on top of their sport and protect the secrets of how they did it.

Drugs in cycling is not a new theme but no book before The Secret Race explored it in such detail or with such devastating consequences.

Richard Moore has written a number of fine books on cycling but The Dirtiest Race in History is not one of them.  The focus of his investigative spotlight instead is the other arena damaged by the curse of drugs, that of athletics.

The race in question is the 1988 Olympic 100 metres final, won by the subsequently disqualified Ben Johnson.  Until Armstrong's catalogue of misdeeds was exposed, Johnson was the highest profile cheat in the history of competition and Moore, reasonably enough, chose an Olympic year to dig deeper into the scandal than any previous research had gone, drawing upon countless interviews and a meticulous exploration of the story and its background.

He could never hope to match Hamilton's impact. Moreover, in a year determined to celebrate all that is good about the Olympics, he was seeking to appeal to a potential audience perhaps less interested in the dark side of the Games than he might have anticipated.  Yet there is much to commend it, not least in the questions raised over the legitimacy of the test that brought about Johnson's downfall.

The Dirtiest Race in History is from the Wisden Sports Writing series also responsible for We'll Get 'Em in Sequins, Max Davidson's clever and amusing dissertation on manliness, viewed through the lives of iconic Yorkshire cricketers, and for Martin Kelner's lovely romp through the history of sport on television, Sit Down and Cheer.

Kelner -- whose Screen Break column for The Guardian has sadly fallen foul of the paper's latest round of cost cutting -- is a naturally witty writer who often needs to resort to little more than his sense of humour to engage the reader.  Sit Down and Cheer has more to it than that, with input from many of those involved in bringing sport to our screens as it charts the evolution of sport on television, which is, after all, how the majority of fans get their fix.  Yet it is no less funny and entertaining for that.

Humour of a different kind is central to Clare Balding's memoir of childhood, My Animals and Other Family.  The radio and television presenter's early life was dominated by various pets - largely dogs - and the horses her father trained at the racing stables that doubled as the family home, visited from time to time by The Queen among other patrons.  Strictly speaking it isn't a sports book -- Balding's career behind a microphone will doubtless provide a sequel -- but the fact that the equine characters include Mill Reef and other stars of the track gives it authenticity of a kind.

When Simon Jordan, the former mobile phone entrepreneur and chairman of Crystal Palace, published the story of his 10 disastrous years at Selhurst Park, it was difficult to imagine it could possibly have a claim to be the football book of the year.  Jordan, famous for his unnaturally tanned skin and unfeasibly blond hair, at one time seemed to represent much of what there was to dislike about football but his story, Be Careful What You Wish For, deserved its place on the William Hill shortlist.

Jordan employs a ready fund of clichés and at times you may find yourself cringing at his behaviour but there are some jaw-dropping tales of what serves as acceptable business practice in a football world populated by sharp agents and officials of questionable competence.

Yet, for all the praise bestowed on Be Careful What You Wish For by the bookie prize panel, the Sports Bookshelf would place it no higher than third among the best football books of 2012.

Of greater literary merit, certainly, are Anthony Clavane's Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here and Duncan Hamilton's The Footballer Who Could Fly.

Clavane, whose brilliant Promised Land was Best Football Book at the 2011 British Sports Book Awards, developed the theme of Jews in football that was central to Promised Land by embarking on a history of Jewish involvement in English football from east London parks in the late 19th century to the boardrooms of the present day, each of the 11 chapters focusing on a key individual.  Clavane tells some fascinating stories and reveals himself again to be a fine writer.

The same can be said of Duncan Hamilton, already an award-winner several times over, who intertwines the development of football in his lifetime with poignant memories of his struggle to forge a close bond with his father when all they had in common was a love of the game.

Although he has been accused at times of being a little too much the misty-eyed nostalgic, Hamilton is capable of delivering a wonderful turn of phrase and The Footballer Who Could Fly recreates the age of Jackie Milburn as vividly as the modern world of Lionel Messi.

Also recommended is Life's a Pitch, an engaging collection of essays by assembled by Michael Calvin, who asked 18 football writers to reveal the secret which professionalism demands they keep to themselves while going about their daily business, namely the club with which their personal allegiance lies.

Rory Smith, John Cross, Martin Lipton, Ian Ridley, Janine Self and Jonathan Wilson are among those who consented to shed the cloak of impartiality.  Their confessions have provided many an entertaining hour.

Greatly enjoyable, too, was El Clasico, a detailed study of the rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona in which Barcelona-based journalist Richard Fitzpatrick delves deep into the history and background to arguably the world's most intense, most keenly felt football enmity, explaining all its social and political dimensions.

Cricket rarely fails to serve up a gem or two.  David Warner's The Sweetest Rose is among them, written to mark the 150th anniversary of the formation of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, on January 8, 1863.

Warner is the doyen of the Yorkshire press box, who has been recording the fortunes of the county of the white rose on a daily basis -- at least in the summer months -- since he became cricket correspondent of the Bradford Telegraph and Argus in 1975.

No one is thus more qualified to chart the colourful and often stormy history of the world's most famous cricket club than Warner and he does so diligently, faithfully and even-handedly, recording the great matches, the great deeds and the great characters, from Lord Hawke to Michael Vaughan and all those in between -- Wilfred Rhodes, Len Hutton, Fred Trueman and, of course, Geoffrey Boycott, to name but four. It is a fine record that will endure among the definitive works on Yorkshire cricket.

The Sports Bookshelf was also taken with Gentlemen and Players, in which Charles Williams, also known as Lord Williams of Elvel and, on cricket scorecards in the 1950s, CCP Williams, recalls the decline and eventual death of amateurism in cricket.

Williams, educated at Westminster School and Oxford University, had a successful career in business and later became an eminent biographer of 20th century political leaders and cricketers.  Before that, he represented Oxford University and Essex at cricket as an amateur and appeared in one of the last Gentlemen versus Players matches.

Far from penning a lament for some lost golden age, Williams has produced a notable social history in which he points up the hypocrisy of the amateur era and hails the advance of professionalism as essentially good for the game.

Somewhat unheralded when it appeared on the shelves in October, the biography of the year is undoubtedly Gideon Haigh's On Warne, which is the wonderful Australian cricket writer's view on the life and times and complexities of Shane Warne, the brilliant spin bowler and at his peak one of the best known sportsmen on the planet.  Anything written by Haigh is a pleasure to read; this combines elegance with considerable wisdom and insight.
In the days mourning his woefully premature passing, it is of some small consolation to recall that the writer and broadcaster Christopher Martin-Jenkins managed to add a personal memoir to the vast number of words he wrote about cricket to a life cut tragically short by cancer on New Year's Day.

CMJ -- A Cricketing Life, which was published in April, revealed much more of himself than might have been expected of a man with a natural reserve.  There is plenty about cricket and many strong but well thought-out opinions, the expression of which was fundamental to his devotion to the game, but also a good deal about the upbringing and his private life behind one of Test Match Special's best-loved voices, some details of which shattered a few misconceptions.

Away from cricket,  no list of the best sports books of 2012 should fail to include That Near-Death Thing, Rick Broadbent's fine study of the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races through the compelling stories of four riders, nor Touching Distance, the extraordinary story of Olympic rower James Cracknell's voyage of recovery from a serious, personality-changing brain injury suffered in 2010 when he was hit by the wing mirror of a truck while undertaking an endurance challenge in Arizona.

Those with a taste for the adventurous, meanwhile, should try Nick Hurst's Sugong: The Life of a Shaolin Master, a gripping tale in which the author, having quit his job in advertising to train in martial arts in Malaysia, ends up writing in effect a biography of his grand master, whose life story could have been the plot for a thriller, spiced with political strife, gangland feuds and fraught love affairs.

Among the welter of Olympic books, special mention should be made of My Time, the full story of the growing up and competitive life of Bradley Wiggins -- now 'Sir' Bradley, of course -- in his own words, and of Yorkshire's Olympic Heroes, by Nick Westby of the Yorkshire Post newspaper, who quite rightly decided that the astonishing medal haul acquired by that one county -- including a staggering seven golds -- should be celebrated with a book of its own.

With two silvers and three bronzes for good measure, Yorkshire -- the county of Jessica Ennis, Nicola Adams and the Brownlee brothers among others -- would have finished 12th in the medals table had it been an independent country, a status for which many of its residents believe it has been qualified for years.


Click on the titles for more information or to buy

The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France, by Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle (Bantam Press)
The Dirtiest Race in History: Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the 1988 Olympic 100m Final , by Richard Moore (Wisden Sports Writing)
Sit Down and Cheer: A History of Sport on TV , by Martin Kelner (Wisden Sports Writing)
My Animals and Other Family
Be Careful What You Wish For, by Simon Jordan (Yellow Jersey)
Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?: The Story of English Football's Forgotten Tribe, by Anthony Clavane (Quercus)
The Footballer Who Could Fly, by Duncan Hamilton (Century)
Life's a Pitch, edited by Michael Calvin (Integr8 Books)
El Clasico: Barcelona v Real Madrid: Football's Greatest Rivalry, by Richard Fitzpatrick (Bloomsbury)
The Sweetest Rose: 150 Years of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, by David Warner (Great Northern Books)
Gentlemen & Players: The Death of Amateurism in Cricket by Charles Williams (Weidenfeld & Nicholson)
On Warne, by Gideon Haigh (Simon & Schuster)
CMJ: A Cricketing Life, by Christopher Martin-Jenkins (Simon & Schuster)
That Near Death Thing: Inside the Most Dangerous Race in the World, by Rick Broadbent (Orion)
Touching Distance, by James Cracknell and Beverley Turner (Century)
Sugong: The Life of a Shaolin Grandmaster, by Nick Hurst (SportsBooks)
My Time: An Autobiography, by Bradley Wiggins (Yellow Jersey)
Yorkshire's Olympic Heroes, by Nick Westby (Great Northern Books)

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Shelves groaning under weight of new Olympics books - none heavier than David Miller's 'magisterial' history

The sports book market has a Super Thursday of its own this week, with the memoirs of three Olympic superstars launching simultaneously on November 8, when autobiographies of Jessica Ennis, Bradley Wiggins and Lord Coe will be competing for the biggest display stands at bookstores up and down the land.


Their appearance will sound the starting gun on the pre-Christmas sales rush if it is not already under way.  Shelves are groaning a little more every day now with the release of new titles.

None more so, literally, than those stacked with the latest version of David Miller's mammoth Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC, Athens to London, 1894-2012, published by Mainstream.

This is the third - arguably the fourth - edition of the veteran journalist Miller's unrivaled tome, which first appeared in 2003 to mark the return of the Games to Athens in 2004, was updated ahead of the Beijing Olympics in 2007 and has been further revised to include London 2012. Published in April this year ahead of the Games, this version includes a detailed account of how the latest medalists achieved their goals.

At 720 pages long, it weighs in at almost three kilos, which almost certainly entitles it to a line in the record books of its own as the heaviest book about the Games.  A combination of statistical records with anecdotal history, it has been described by more than one reviewer as magisterial in its authority.

Then again, Miller has few peers when it comes to first-hand acquaintance with Olympic history.   A journalist since he left  Cambridge University in 1956, former chief sports writer of both the Daily Express and The Times -- and at 79 still a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph sports pages -- he has attended 19 summer and winter Games.

While it is undoubtedly the giant among the official Olympic Games publications that have marked the London Games, it might struggle to rival London 2012: The Official Book, which served as a preview and guide to the summer spectacular. More than 36,000 copies were sold, according to Nielsen BookScan, putting it among the bestselling sports book of 2012, only just behind diving pin-up boy Tom Daley's pictorial autobiography, My Story.

Not surprisingly, the Olympic theme makes its presence strongly felt right across the list of new publications.  In the last 90 days, there have been more than 150 new sports books with a connection with the Olympics.

Noteworthy among the latest are James Cracknell's Touching Distance and Ian Thorpe's This Is Me, both of which come with deeply personal subplots to the stories of Olympic success.


Cracknell, the double Olympic gold medal-winning rower, tells the harrowing story -- with the help of his wife, the television presenter Beverley Turner -- of how his life has changed since he suffered serious brain damage while taking part in the cycling stage of an endurance event in Arizona, when the wing mirror of a petrol tanker struck his head.

Thorpe, the multi medal-winning Olympic swimmer, reveals the battle against depression and alcohol problems that he managed to keep secret during the peak years of his career but which he now feels free to discuss.

The Australian legend of the pool failed to qualify for London 2012, despite coming out of retirement with the express purpose of reaching the required standard.  But at least he was spared the necessity of revising his story to include a clutch of new medals.

Sir Chris Hoy, on the other hand, rendered his 2009 autobiography incomplete by winning two more golds on the cycling track, making him Britain's most decorated Olympian in terms of gold medals won.  Helpfully, there is a new, updated version in paperback, published by HarperSport.

On Amazon:

The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC: Athens to London 1894-2012, by David Miller  (Mainstream)
Touching Distance, by James Cracknell and Beverley Turner (Century)
This is Me: The Autobiography, by Ian Thorpe (Simon & Schuster)
Chris Hoy: The Autobiography (HarperSport)
My Story, by Tom Daley (Michael Joseph)

Browse more new books at The Sports Bookshelf Shop

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Bradley Wiggins takes a starring role alongside Stuart Broad, Gary Lineker and Sam Warburton on publishing's Super Thursday

Today has been the publishing world's so-called Super Thursday, the October date that signals the start of the Christmas sales push. Among 97 new titles to hit the shelves, the crop of new sports books includes offerings from Stuart Broad and Gary Lineker -- and two books that will hope to benefit from the wave of popularity that has made Bradley Wiggins into a strong contender to be named BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

We will not know the thoughts of the Tour de France winner and Olympic champion himself until November 8 -- publication date for Yellow Jersey's new Wiggins autobiography, My Time -- but in the meantime, two titles celebrating the feats of sport's most famous mod revivalist are released today.

Bradley Wiggins: The Story of Britain's Greatest Ever Cyclist, by Press Association journalist Matt McGeehan is published by Carlton Books.  The 128-page biography looks at how the Wiggins 2012 success story has been more than a decade in the making, tracing back his rise to the posters of the great Spanish cyclist Miguel Indurain that adorned his bedroom wall as he grew up in inner-city London.

Cycling journalist Daniel Friebe, author of the Eddy Merckx biography, The Cannibal, and Mark Cavendish's ghostwriter on Boy Racer, offers Allez Wiggo! How Bradley Wiggins Won the Tour de France and Olympic Gold in 2012.  Published by Bloomsbury Sport and spanning 176 pages, Friebe looks in particular at the strategy Team Sky employed to help Wiggins become the first British winner of the Tour.

Wiggins is a popular subject at the moment -- cycling journalist and friend John Deering tells his story, too, in Tour de Force, which was published by Birlinn at the beginning of this month -- and while today's cycling headlines are regrettable for the sport, the Wiggins story offers a timely counter to the sordid details thrown up by the Lance Armstrong enquiry.

Carlton have been by far the busiest sports publishers on Super Thursday, with three titles from sports statistician, historian and journalist Keir Radnedge alone.   These are an updated fourth edition of the best-selling World Football Records (256 pages), a new post-London 2012 edition of Olympic and World Records (208 pages), and the former World Soccer editor's 288-page Complete Encyclopedia of Football.

Gary Lineker's light-hearted Football - It's Unbelievable is also from the Carlton stable, as is Mike Hammond's exhaustively comprehensive UEFA European Football Yearbook, now in its 25th year as the ultimate reference for European football, covering not only the international teams and the Champions League but the domestic leagues in all 53 UEFA member countries.

Completing the clutch of Carlton titles are Robert Lodge's collection of bizarre football stories, A Game of Three Halves, Bruce Jones's 288-page Complete Encyclopedia of Formula One and Ian Valentine's unusual Cricket Yesterday and Today, which uses photographs from the modern era with days past to compare and contrast the cricketing giants of history with the stars of today.

On a cricketing theme, look out also for Going Barmy, Paul Winslow's first-hand account of life as a member of the England cricket team's loyal unofficial entourage, the Barmy Army. Published by SportsBooks, this is an engaging tale of cricket obsession, with a foreword by the England off-spinner and Barmy Army hero, Graeme Swann.

There will be much interest in Stuart Broad's My World in Cricket, in which the England fast bowler and Twenty20 captain reveals among other things the techniques and tactics, mental and physical, that have helped him succeed in top-level cricket, with advice on how to apply the same formula to the game at any level, either in club or schoolboy cricket.


My World in Cricket is published by Simon and Schuster, who also unveiled rugby star Sam Warburton's Refuse to be Denied: My Grand Slam Year, in which the Wales captain talks about the drama and disappointment of the rugby World Cup in New Zealand, in which he was controversially sent off in the semi-final against France, and his triumphant return to lead Wales to Six Nations glory.

Look out also for As The Crow Flies: My Journey to Ironman World Champion, by Craig Alexander (Bloomsbury Sport), The 368-page Official Illustrated History of Manchester United: 1878-2012 (Simon & Schuster), John Hartson's Celtic Dream Team (Black and White), and Ayrton Senna: The Messiah of Motor Racing, by Richard Craig (Darton, Longman and Todd).

For more information and to buy, visit the Super Thursday page at The Sports Bookshelf Shop.

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Jessica Ennis adds final chapter to a golden year with story of how she fulfilled her Olympic dreams

COMING SOON: Unbelievable - From Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold

The autobiography of Olympic heptathlon champion Jessica Ennis

It is a measure of the essential modesty of Olympic golden girl Jessica Ennis that she was reluctant to commit to telling her life story before London 2012 because she was not sure that she had done enough to warrant it.

The idea was discussed earlier this year, when she asked Rick Broadbent, the athletics writer who had ghosted her column in The Times since 2009, if he would be willing to work with her, only to decide that she did not want to blur her focus on her ultimate goal.

"We talked about it but she was always in two minds," Broadbent told The Sports Bookshelf. "She didn't want to do it because, in her mind, she had not really achieved anything, so the project was put on hold."

Ennis had been European and World heptathlon champion but only Olympic gold would satisfy her definition of achievement and it was not until the medal was hers on that memorable August night in east London that she felt she had a story to share. The rights to her autobiography were not assigned to publishers Hodder and Stoughton until the first week in September.

It gave Broadbent a testing schedule to deliver the manuscript on time but having written a number of books in his own name and ghosted others, he had some experience to draw on.  He had the benefit, too, of a well-established working relationship with his subject. The book will be published on November 8.

"It helped that I've known Jessica for some years so a lot of the background was familiar to me already," he said. "I first met her in 2008 and we have worked together on her column in The Times since 2009.

"And I like her as a person. She is genuinely lovely and a pleasure to deal with, and that isn't something you can always say about people involved in professional sport at the highest level.  She is the nicest person I've met in my career in journalism."

"She had never cried on the podium before."

Ennis has a personality that exudes warmth and her place in the affections of the British public was only reinforced when, in her trackside interview with the BBC's Phil Jones in the aftermath of her Olympic victory, she struggled in vain to hold her emotions in check.  Tearful scenes at the moment of triumph or defeat have become commonplace but for Ennis, a proud Yorkshire girl with some Sheffield steel beneath the soft exterior, it was a first.

"She had never cried on the podium before," Broadbent said. "It was a first show of emotion in public.  She had always managed to hold it in before, even at the lowest moments.

"She has been through the mill with injuries, missing the Beijing Olympics of course.  So after winning in London I think it was just a total outpouring of relief.  She knew it was her one chance really to be Olympic champion and she had done it."

Broadbent first encountered Ennis at Gotzis in Austria in 2008, when he was among the journalists who interviewed her as she lay on a couch, her foot encased in ice after the fateful injury to her right ankle had forced her to withdraw from competition only 10 weeks ahead of the Beijing games.

"It was typical of her that she insisted she would be okay, that it was only a precaution.  Of course when she got home the scans revealed the triple fracture and her Olympic dream was over."

It would not be the first time she would put on a brave face while inside wanting to cry.  Her book will reveal, however, that away from the public gaze Ennis can be as emotional as any young athlete.

"Behind the scenes there have been tears left, right and centre at times," Broadbent said. "It is not a misery memoir by any means but there bits that the public don't see.

"She has what you might call a love-hate relationship with her coach, Toni Minichiello, that can get a bit feisty.  They can go at each other pretty hard.  She has been with him since she was 13 and I think she feels he treats her sometimes as if she were still 13.

"There have been moments, too, when she has been deeply worried about her health.  She had a time when she was suffering from serious bouts of dizziness, so bad that she could hardly stand, and she had to undergo a brain scan.  It turned out that it was an inner ear problem but she found it pretty scary at the time."

The story reveals, too, that Ennis has a strong sense of what she feels is right for her and that she will not be pushed around.

"This was her one last shot."

"She came under a lot of pressure to move to London at one stage," Broadbent said. "Charles van Commenee, the head coach of UK Athletics, wanted all the elite athletes and coaches to be based at the Lee Valley Performance Centre in London, and tried to engineer things so that Toni would have to operate from there.

"But Jessica's life was in Sheffield.  She is very close to her family and has a long-term boyfriend and simply refused to move.  It was having that strong connection with her roots that probably kept her grounded and she felt it was important to have a normal life in Sheffield to go back to, away from the limelight."

Broadbent revealed that Ennis speaks out from personal conviction on the subject of body image and eating disorders, prompted by the remarks attributed to an unnamed Great Britain official during the build-up to London 2012 that the 5ft 4ins athlete, renowned for her six-pack, was overweight.

"She was really worried about the message comments like that put out, particularly to young female athletes and girls in general," he said. "She has strong views on body image and eating disorders and drugs as well and she puts them across very well."

There is much in the story about her upbringing in Sheffield as the daughter of a painter and decorator originally from Jamaica and a social worker from Derbyshire who now works for a charity helping people with drug and drink addiction, but also about balancing the commercial opportunities opened to her by fame with the need to keep her eyes on the goal of winning.  Her endorsement contracts only reinforced her status as the poster girl for London 2012, adding to the pressure on her to deliver on the day.

"Don't get me wrong, she likes the profile she has," Broadbent said. "But the build-up to the Games became incredibly stressful for her.  People were expecting her to win but she knows what can go wrong in competition. She also knows she might not get to the next Games in Rio so this was her one shot, her one opportunity to achieve what she had worked for.

"One of the interesting things was that she never wanted to go to the stadium beforehand.  She had never competed in London before the Olympics, not even at Crystal Palace, and she wanted it to be new and exciting."

Ennis has subsequently said that when she stepped into the stadium for the first time ahead of the 100m hurdles event that began the heptathlon programme and was hit by the noise generated by 80,000 spectators in response to her name being called -- a far cry from the half-empty stadiums that often witness the first event in the seven-part programme -- it did give her a significant lift.  Clearly the strategy was the right one.

Unbelievable - From Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold is published by Hodder and Stoughton on November 8.

Rick Broadbent is the author of several critically acclaimed books, on football, boxing and motorsport.
His Ring of Fire: The Inside Story of Valentino Rossi and MotoGP was shortlisted for the 2009 William Hill Sports Book of the Year.

That followed Looking For Eric: In Search of The Leeds Greats and The Big If: The Life and Death of Johnny Owen .

He returned to motorsport this year with That Near Death Thing: Inside the Most Dangerous Race in the World, which focuses on the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races through the story of four leading riders.

He also collaborated with paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson and motorcycle racer Ron Haslam on their autobiographies.

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My Animals and Other Family, by Clare Balding: Acclaimed Olympic broadcaster reveals talent for writing in charming but frank childhood memoir

Clare Balding is hardly new to television, and hardly new to winning television awards.  She picked up her first in 2003, when she was named Sports Presenter of the Year by the Royal Television Society, by which time she was long established as the face of BBC's horse racing coverage and was looking ahead to her third Olympics, having covered Atlanta for BBC radio and Sydney for television.

Since then she has become a popular and authoritative voice at Wimbledon for 5 Live and has embraced rugby league, of all sports, with the same enthusiasm and professionalism that characterises all her work.  Drafted in to help with the BBC's Diamond Jubilee coverage, she met the challenge with seemingly effortless aplomb.

Yet London 2012, her fifth summer Games, has somehow elevated her from admired and respected -- a description, you suspect, with which she would have been entirely satisfied, even as an epitaph -- to the status of national treasure in the echelons of broadcasting.  In the broader scheme of the BBC's Olympic coverage, Balding's role as swimming anchor was some way down the credits from Gary Lineker and Sue Barker but columnists were quickly falling over one another to join in a chorus of praise.   The Guardian described her performance as 'Olympic gold'.  The New Statesman agreed that she was 'witty, empathetic and charming to viewers and interviewees alike' and also admired her for deploying 'knowledge and expertise in a firm but friendly manner – never overwhelming you with statistics, but always telling you things you didn’t already know.'

In the Daily Mail, the frequently acerbic and often unforgiving Jan Moir wrote an entire piece under the headline 'Why Can't Everyone Be Clare Balding?', without even the smallest trace of irony.  Moir laid into Lineker, writing that 'his flinty self-interest and laddish reactions were brutally exposed' but described Balding as 'a broadcaster with such an exceptional skill set she makes everyone else in her orbit seem third rate'.

Could there be a more opportune moment, then, to launch an autobiography?  The release of My Animals and Other Family is timed perfectly to ride this wave of popularity and has leaped to the top of the bestseller lists within a week of publication, although anyone tempted to raise an eyebrow should not really need reminding of how long it takes in publishing to be an overnight success.

Clare signed her deal with Viking in June last year, by which time the story of her childhood was already a manuscript.   When she first picked up a pen and began to jot down ideas, she would have felt it presumptuous to assume she would be involved with London 2012 let alone emerge as one of its stars.

My Animals and Other Family will not dilute her popularity.  On one hand it is a tale of privilege, of a girl born into wealth, descended from nobility, the daughter of a handsome racehorse trainer brought up in a vast house where The Queen would drop in for breakfast.

On the other, while it was hardly intended as a misery memoir, it is one that engenders sympathy in that hers was a childhood that began with Balding's matriarchal grandmother consoling her mother for not having given birth to a boy.  For most of the subsequent years, struggling for approval and acceptance, she worried constantly about what other people would make of her appearance, her character and, latterly, her sexuality, while growing up in a male-dominated world she would in some ways come to hate.

Yet she overcame the hurdles, metaphorical and well as literal, that were in front of her.  Where her mother had been denied the opportunity of an education by a family who did not think academic attainment to be a suitable ambition for a girl, Clare studied at Cambridge and returned with a 2:1 in English.  She was also a champion amateur jockey and worked her way up the broadcasting ladder from humble trainee.

The most affectionate memories are reserved for the animals of the title, a succession of dogs and horses that each had significance for her during the first 20 years of her life.  Beginning with Candy, the chestnut-and-white boxer dog who took it upon herself to be the baby Clare's companion and protector, the story moves on to Mill Reef, the Derby winner on whose back she perched, with no saddle and certainly no helmet, aged just 18 months, without an adult in sight.  She describes these relationships with wit and charm.

As an adult, Balding has been successfully treated for cancer, been proudly open about her homosexuality -- she lives with the BBC newsreader Alice Arnold, with whom she was joined in a civil partnership in 2006 -- and has railed against bigotry, successfully complaining to the Press Complaints Commission over an article written about her in the Sunday Times, in which the writer A A Gill was ruled to have referred to her sexuality 'in a demeaning and gratuitous way'.

Those topics will presumably be developed in a second volume.  The deal signed with Viking last year was for two books.

Buy Clare Balding's My Animals and Other Family direct from amazon.co.uk

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London 2012: The Greatest Show on Earth, by Jon Mattos: Keep the Olympic passion burning with this - and more - lavish commemorative books

TRENDING...RELIVE LONDON 2012

It may have finished but it will never be forgotten -- and there are plenty of upcoming books that will provide the prompts to help relive the magic of the Olympic dream that was London 2012.

Indeed, there is a whole series of official London 2012 Olympic Games commemorative titles due to appear between now and October -- and these are some to look out for.  They can be pre-ordered by clicking on the picture links or the highlighted titles.

Quick off the blocks is London 2012: The Greatest Show on Earth, which promises to relive every important moment from every day, from Opening Ceremony to last Sunday's fantastic finale, with everything in between, recording the joy and exultation of the Olympic gold medallists as well as remembering some of the hard-luck stories.

The book is structured in such a way to provide a day-by-day record not only of who won what but of the great stories, outstanding achievements and heroic performances that lay behind each triumph, all brought to life by stunning action photographs.  It will serve as the perfect keepsake from a fantastic Games.

Written by Jon Mattos, who was part of the Press Association's team covering the Games, and published by Carlton Books, it is due to be released on September 13. Pre-order it now.

If you are prepared to wait a little longer, an October 12 publication date is the target for what promises to be the ultimate story of perhaps the finest two weeks of sport ever witnessed on English soil.

London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games : The Official Commemorative Book traces the whole incredible story, from early concepts through to the physical creation of the Olympic Park, the Torch Relay and the innovative Cultural Olympiad. It explores both Games in detail, revealing how record-breaking athletes, spectators, volunteers and locals combined to make London 2012 such a stunning success story.  Beautifully designed and featuring the Games' most evocative photography and a foreword by Lord Coe, the driving force behind bringing the Olympics to Britain and making it such a triumph for the nation, London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games: The Commemorative Book promises to capture and preserve the magical atmosphere of a once in a lifetime event.

The authors are the husband-and-wife team of Sybil Ruscue and Tom Knight, who were asked by publishers John Wiley and Sons to take on the mammoth project together.  Ruscoe is best known as a former BBC Radio Five Live presenter but whose experience of sports reporting goes back to her days on weekly papers in Shropshire in 1978.  Knight is a former Daily Telegraph athletics correspondent with more than 30 years in sports journalism, and who has witnessed eight Olympic Games. Follow this link to pre-order.

A week later, a Box Set will be released that combines the official Commemorative Book with The Games, written by another Telegraph journalist, Brendan Gallagher.

The Games: Britain's Olympic and Paralympic Journey to London 2012 traces Britain's Olympic and Paralympic past through powerful narrative, striking anecdotes and over 250 original images. It captures the individual atmosphere of past Games across the world, from 1930s Berlin to 1980s Moscow, Sydney in the Millennium to Beijing's Birds Nest in 2008, and explores the explosion of interest in the Paralympic Games.

London's previous roles as host, rescuing the Games in 1904 after Vesuvius erupted and battling with postwar austerity in 1948, are considered both as contemporaries saw them and from a historical perspective, as are individual stories of British medal winners. The final chapter focuses on preparations for London 2012, from individual athletes to the radical keynotes of sustainability and regeneration.

Gallagher is also the author of Making History at London 2012, which is subtitled 25 Iconic Moments at the Olympic and Paralympic games, a commemorative anthology featuring 25 first-hand accounts from some of the UK's finest journalists, whose powerful narrative conveys the intense atmosphere of the moments that defined London 2012, including the renovation of the Olympic Park, the nationwide Torch Relay, the inspiring performances by individuals and teams, the innovative Cultural Olympiad and spectacular Opening and Closing Ceremonies.

Also published by John Wiley and Sons on October 12, Making History at London 2012 will form half of another Boxed Set due for release a week later with Heat of the Moment, which is a collection of 25 extraordinary stories from the history of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Already available is The Olympic Torch Relay : Follow the Flame of London, which traces the route of relay around the UK week by week, Stunning photography and lively narrative explore the excitement of the Torch Relay as the countdown towards the London 2012 Games gathers pace. The book traces the route around the UK, week by week, celebrating the diverse regions in powerful images of landscape, buildings, banners and local specialities, from biscuits to beers.

Written by Sarah Edworthy and illustrated with many evocative photographs, it is a pageant of amusing anecdotes and intriguing stories from spectators and torch bearers, as well as adding the perspective of ‘local heroes' competing in the London 2012 Games. The Olympic Torch Relay : Follow the Flame of London (John Wiley & Sons) is a fascinating portrait of a nation full of expectation, poised on the brink of a sporting phenomenon, a reminder of how almost every corner of the land acquired a place in Olympic history.

To buy or pre-order any of these books, click on the illustrations or the highlighted titles to be taken to the amazon.co.uk site.

For more Olympic books, visit the Sports Bookshelf Shop

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