The green flag won’t fall on the 29th grand prix of Long Beach for another 24 hours and 45 minutes, which means it’s time to stand in the pit lane and watch the competitors in the pro-celebrity race buzz past in their souped-up Toyotas, marvelling all the while at how a simple word like “celebrity” can be bent and stretched and twisted until it loses its meaning entirely.

If appearances counted for anything, then Floyd Landis would be arriving in London for the start of the Tour de France next week as the pre-emptive favourite to defend his stunning victory of last July, and not as a pariah. Never has a man looked so innocent, so steady of gaze and sweet of disposition.

Controversy, never a stranger to the career of Michelle Wie, turned into downright calamity this week amid suggestions that the game’s most famous prodigy feigned an injury during an LPGA Tour event to avoid falling victim to the rule under which players who shoot a round of 88 or worse are banned from the women’s tour for the rest of the season.

The playing of this year’s British Open championship will not be accompanied by the sound of golfers whining, it seems, after the Royal & Ancient on Thursday unveiled a remodelled Carnoustie and promised that it would offer a fair test of the best players in the world.

Of the countless stories about Clifford Roberts, the southern banker who founded Augusta National Golf Club along with Bobby Jones and who was the club’s chairperson from 1931 to 1976, there is more than a ring of truth to one about his choosing to go on holiday to South Africa because he liked apartheid.

In a country that worships its athletes like no other, Jeev Milkha Singh has intimate knowledge of what it is like to be a sporting deity. His father, Milkha ”The Flying Sikh” Singh, was and remains India’s most famous sprinter courtesy of his exploits on the track back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when he was recognised as one of the best 400m runners in the world.