Archery: Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence’s archery tournament puts her heroine May Welland ahead (at least in Olympic relevance terms) of Suzanne Collins’s Katniss Everdeen, who merely uses her bow to survive.
Athletics: Jean Echenoz
The Goncourt-winning French novelist’s docunovel Running is about the Czech distance runner Emil Zátopek, winner of three golds in 1952. Close behind is Alan Sillitoe’s “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, and in non-fiction there’s Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.
Basketball: Tom Wolfe
As well as providing the strongest strand in Wolfe’s campus novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, hoops are central in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian.
Boxing: Ernest Hemingway
“Fifty Grand”, his tale of a title bout, just wins the verdict over Jack London’s The Game in fiction, but the best fight writing (eg by AJ Liebling, Norman Mailer or George Plimpton) is journalism.
Cycling: Tim Krabbé
Bike buffs rate the Dutch author’s The Rider as the best study of road racing, while the protagonists of Chris Cleave’s Gold are track sprint stars. It’s recreational cycling, though, that has appealed to writers such as Flann O’Brien (The Third Policeman), HG Wells (The Wheels of Chance) and Jonathan Coe (What a Carve Up!).
Equestrian: Jilly Cooper
Riders, her raunchy romp about show-jumpers and other horsey types, climaxes at the LA Olympics.
Fencing: Arturo Pérez-Reverte
The Spanish novelist’s The Fencing Master is a 19th-century tale of an ageing anachronism in the era of the gun, who agrees to take on a female pupil in scenes anticipating the sword training of Arya Stark in George RR Martin’s A Game of Thrones.
Football: David Peace
The Damned Utd and Red or Dead make Peace the undisputed No 1, but Julian Barnes (as Dan Kavanagh), Sebastian Faulks, Philip Kerr and Joanna Trollope have written novels wholly or partly about the sport. Women’s football is the subject of Narinder Dhami’s Bend It Like Beckham.
Golf: Agatha Christie
Poirot makes his second appearance in The Murder on the Links (1923); other golfing fiction ranges from hard-boiled (Pete Dexter’s Train) to humorous (countless PG Wodehouse stories).
Gymnastics: Megan Abbott
Abbott’s just-published You Will Know Me is a murder mystery centred on an obsessive teenage US gymnast aiming for elite status.
Hockey: Ronald Searle
Searle’s cartoons of St Trinian’s girls weaponised by the hockey sticks they always carry are still the standard-bearers for an under-fictionalised sport.
Rowing: Patricia Highsmith
Bertie Wooster’s repeated references to Boat Race misbehaviour are the closest fiction comes to featuring battling boats; but non-racing rowing appears frequently from Homer to Jerome K Jerome and Highsmith, who makes it a convenience for killers in both Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley.
Rugby: Reginald Hill
A rugby club is at the heart of Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe mystery A Clubbable Woman, while in literary fiction the sport’s key appearance is in the famous line of EM Forster’s The Longest Journey tersely reporting the death of Gerald, “broken up in the football match”.
Sailing: Arthur C Clarke
His sci-fi story “Sunjammer” is admittedly about competing spacecraft with “solar sails” propelled by sunlight, but Olympic-style sailboat racing is rarely depicted. For non-competitive sailing, try Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons novels or Charles Williams’s Dead Calm.
Swimming: Christos Tsiolkas
Barracuda, his follow-up to The Slap, features a champion swimmer expected to star at the Sydney Olympics. Synchronised swimming, meanwhile, has figured in films (Celine Sciamma’s Water Lilies) but has yet to attract novelists.
Taekwondo: Ian Fleming
Oddjob in Goldfinger is taekwondo-trained, though his tactic of choice is hurling his steel-brimmed hat. Other fictional martial arts exponents tend to appear in comics, but the eponymous hero of John Grisham’s Rogue Lawyer moonlights as a manager of MMA fighters.
Tennis: David Foster Wallace
Besides writing essays (collected in String Theory) on tennis, Wallace put it into Infinite Jest; more tightly tennis-focused novels include Lionel Shriver’s Double Fault and Lauren Weisberger’s The Singles Game.
Wrestling: John Irving
Garp in The World According to Garp excels in the bizarre Greco-Roman form of wrestling that features in the Olympics, a leitmotif in Irving’s work.
