It’s been 38 years since the British ski jumper Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards propelled himself into the freezing Calgary skies, like a “slightly skittish ostrich”, to finish last in the 1988 Winter Olympics, says Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. In doing so, the lovable tryer won the hearts of millions. Twenty police officers were required to escort him when he landed back at Heathrow, where some 10,000 fans were waiting to “salute the nation’s madcap misfit”. Before long he’d released a pop single, Fly Eddie Fly, and appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show alongside fellow guest Burt Reynolds. His fame rose again with the 2016 biopic Eddie the Eagle, which became that year’s highest-grossing British movie.

His life wasn’t always so exhilarating. Bereft of financial backing at the start of his career, he would borrow his mother’s car to drive around Europe, parking overnight in the basements of apartment blocks for extra warmth. He once accepted a bed in a Finnish psychiatric hospital where a local ski jump trainer was helping to renovate one of the wards and spent other nights sleeping in cow sheds and scraping food out of bins. The sheer improbability of his going on to become an “Olympic hero” gave his story a priceless romanticism. Today he’s still celebrated, with good reason, as one of life’s “great enthusiasts”, and, at 62, is showing no signs of slowing down. “I’d like to think I could get back to my old standard or beyond,” he says. “My biggest ambition now is to ski a black run on my 100th birthday.”

British horse racing is petering out, says Martha Gill in The Observer. Dozens of tracks have closed in the past five decades and the number of punters is dwindling by the year. What a shame it would be to lose the “sport of kings”. Its phrases pepper our language: “dark horse”; “neck and neck”; “frontrunner”; “down to the wire”; “hands down”; “on your tod”. Almost every English monarch since Henry VIII has raced horses – Charles II moved his entire court to Newmarket twice a year for the racing season – and every single modern thoroughbred can trace its lineage to three horses imported to Britain in the late 17th century. Despite its decline, racing remains our second-largest spectator sport after football, contributing around £4bn to the economy each year. Royal Ascot and the Grand National still “transfix the nation”, and the Cheltenham Festival is an “international phenomenon”, broadcast in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, the US, Australia and much of Europe.

When a young Matt Goodwin first embarked on his academic research into the radical right in Britain in the 2000s, says Samuel Rubinstein in UnHerd, it was in the manner of “Jane Goodall and the chimpanzees”. Today, as Reform’s candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, he is “swinging from tree to tree”. Goodwin’s transition from liberal political scientist to right-wing pundit and now politician is sometimes presented as a kind of Damascene conversion – or, by his more cynical critics, as the product of “audience capture, ego or grift”. But the seeds of today’s Goodwin were always there. Hours of interviews with BNP supporters in the early 2010s convinced him not only that there existed “far broader support for the radical right” than the elites or his political science colleagues would like to admit, but also that, among much that was deplorable, there were “legitimate grievances”.

Goodwin’s moment came during Brexit. Political scientists had utterly failed to predict the result of the referendum, and tried to explain it away as a Russian plot or a Murdoch coup. Goodwin, meanwhile, had long said that the growing cohort of “angry white men” being economically left behind – and, increasingly, spoken down to by urban elites – weren’t going to put up with it any more. His interpretation, which was widely rejected at the time, has more or less dominated discussion and steered policy in the decade since, reaching its apogee in Boris Johnson’s “Levelling Up” agenda. And, in common with much of the country, his views – right on culture, left on the economy – have been tempered by elite disapproval. The more they are dismissed, the harder they become.