Sport on Television by Keith Duggan

Of course it was Steve Redgrave and his Golden Horde, the Famous Five of Olympic medals, who topped the poll in Channel 4's 100 Greatest Sporting Moments.

For a start, finishing anywhere other than first would have been a severe and unjustified moral blow to a man that has spent the last two decades perfecting the art.

But Redgrave's feat also had an appeal to the armchair athlete that few of the other legendary sporting moments could match. Rowing is one of those cult sports that look deceptively easy, and the average viewer could easily delude himself with the consolation, "That could have been me."

It is the only sport, after all, in which the hero - in this case Redgrave - is actually sitting down for the duration of the drama, a position the avid TV fan can immediately empathise with.

As Redgrave strained forward with the oar, so thousands of his goggle-eyed cheerleaders would stretch selflessly for the ashtray or biscuit tin. And as the Olympian leaned back, his lungs burning for want of oxygen, his audience would, on reflex, sink back into their sofas, prodding those blasted cushions.

As time took an inevitable toll on the once sculpted body, it became all the more natural to identify with this Everyman of sporting heroism. For the last two Olympics, people checked out the rowing not so much to see if Steve could do it again but to make sure he didn't expire. By Atlanta and Sydney, Redgrave had the look of the damned about him, like an ageing man trapped in a boat with three lunatics young enough to be his sons - which, on reflection, he essentially was.

Redgrave's epic Olympic span not only outlived the rise and fall of several political revolutions and wars, it served to remind the masses of their mortality. People had started and finished the task of rearing their families during the years that Redgrave spent out on the water. His time deserves recognition as an era in England, a happier alternative to Thatcherism.

The shock will come in Athens, when there is some new gun out there on the water with a gleaming torso and teenage goatee. Alas, poor Steve, we will whisper as we reposition the coffee cup.

But the Redgrave votes made it clear that endeavour is the quality that the British TV fan ultimately appreciates. Majestic a feat as it was, it was anything but a moment. It was a 20-year grind that embraced the jewels of British virtue: silent suffrage, thankless effort and unfailing modesty. Redgrave's gold medals represent to the English everything that Diego Maradona's pair of goals against England in 1986 did not.

The Hand of God goal in that World Cup quarter-final was anathema to the English sense of fair play, and that the Argentine attributed it to divine justice made it all the more scarring. And only against the English could that "moment of horrible genius" as the Scot Pat Nevin described it, have been followed by perhaps the greatest individual goal of all time.

John Barnes, sitting on the England bench when Maradona danced through half of the team, admitted that he actually had to stop himself from cheering.

Maradona's goal was more in keeping with the spirit of great sporting moments - explosive, unpredictable and inseparable from the calendar in which they occurred. For English sports fans, Ian Botham's fantastic innings against Australia at Headingley will always sum up 1981. Similarly, the dusty Wimbledon epic between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe towers above all other sporting memories of 1980.

While most of the stories that made it into the top 10 are widely recognised, there were a few quintessentially English moments. Torville and Dean's interpretation of Bolero on ice at the 1984 Winter Olympics was judged to be the eighth-best sporting moment ever. The reasons why were not made entirely clear.

"They took something that was really wussy," said commentator Lisa Rogers, "and took it to the next level." Big deal. Louis Walsh has made a career out of doing just that.

Rogers' was a strange tribute, but slightly more eloquent than Jerry Guscott, who was inadvisably chosen to critique the Ali v Foreman classic from 1974. It appears Jerry's days as the frontman of Gladiators has impaired his analytical faculties, for the best he could manage for the most analysed fight of all time was "boom, count him out. Flippin' thanks for coming."

Time is the ultimate judge of polls of this nature, and the fact that England's 5-1 defeat of Germany is so fresh in the mind elevated it to number two, inexplicably one place higher than the 1966 World Cup final match between the same nations. And Gary McAllister's goal for Liverpool against Alaves in the UEFA Cup final - an own goal - came above Carlos Alberto's 1970 World Cup for Brazil? Oh, dear.

The most touching inclusion was Kevin Keegan's passionate loss of control on Sky television a few years back. The unforgettable "I would love it, love it if we beat them now" speech weighed in at number 17. It has the rarest combination of properties: bathos, pathos, foolishness and honesty.

But it was not, as one commentator declared, "pathetic". Keegan's entire sporting life was predicated on wearing his bursting little heart on his sleeve and it would have been impossible to do anything else in his defining moment as a manager. Kevin Keegan will always lie on the opposite end of the sporting spectrum to Steve Redgrave. He is combustible and emotional and way too eager, and no matter how great the insult, he always comes bouncing back. He is not the kind of sportsman who moves people to carve his likeness out of stone. But on his great days - and he had more than most mortals - he made them cheer as loudly as they did for any of the legends.