The Sports Bookshelf

When the title of William Hill Sports Book of the Year was awarded for the first time back in 1989, the winning volume came not from the world of football or cricket or rugby or boxing or any of the sports we regard as mainstream, but from rowing. It was a cracking story, though.   True Blue: The Oxford Boat Race Mutiny , written by the Oxford coach, Dan Topolski, with the help of the author and journalist Patrick Robinson, described the extraordinary events that preceded the 1987 University Boat Race, when five US international rowers parachuted in to bolster a team soundly thrashed on the Thames the year before ultimately quit after a series of clashes with coach Topolski. The 2013 winner will be named this evening, with the possibility that the 25th anniversary award of sport's oldest and richest literary prize will go to another rowing book. The Boys in the Boat: An Epic True-Life Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin , by Daniel James Brown, recounts another out

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. Publ