ABSTRACT
Arguably, sport increasingly provides an arena in which individuals and, indeed, teams can display ‘heroic’ levels of performance and achieve success far beyond the wildest dreams of those who only stand and stare. Sporting heroes, whether Olympians, world champions or, indeed, FA Cup winners, all achieve their status by providing other people with sufficient vicarious excitement to establish a distinctiveness in those people’s minds. There are clearly many winners in sport; in fact, this is the key characteristic of sporting contests. Very few spectators find drawn matches, dead heats or no-score draws quite as exciting as when there is a clear winner. Winners, however, do not all become heroes. Heroes, similarly, may not themselves be winners either. What, then, makes one person achieve the status of ‘hero’ and another, often equally successful, fail to achieve it?
