In a quiet period of humdrum coverage, Emma John ponders the meaning of sport

It is, officially, a mad, mad, mad, mad world. With no unifying summer event - no Olympics, no football World Cup and no cricket worth the Sky subscription - sport is enjoying a brief silly season when there's so little action that international rowing is getting its own hour-long programme, hosted by John Inverdale. It's the time of year when you'd be forgiven for thinking that Yngling was a national pastime, that golf was the game of the people, or that Zara Phillips was some kind of royalty.

It's a period where you can really appreciate the myriad meanings that sport has to different people. For the purists, it's about the pursuit of physical excellence - taking the human body to the limit of its capability. (Nothing else can explain why the 100-metre sprint is such a macho event - the only other place I've seen semi-clad men doing a ten-second dash is at a Pet Shop Boys concert, when the gates opened.) The purists, naturally, tend to favour athletics, where they can marvel at the raw power of the fastest, strongest competitors on earth. Then moan about the drugs that made them that way.

Then there is the Olympic ideal, left to us by the Victorians, and now touted about by that beacon of virtue, the International Olympic Committee. Sport, in this guise, is a microcosm of a truly dignified society, complete with self-contained moral code and good stiff moustache. (I look forward to the Beijing Olympics, hosted by a human rights-loving government and sponsored by the most caring of global corporations.) If sport is so civilising, why are the authorities engaged in such an unseemly battle to prevent Oscar Pistorius, the double-amputee sprinter, running against able-bodied athletes?

As the Lewis Hamilton phenomenon has demonstrated, sport, for many, is simply about having a champion, a national hero to convince them that our shrinking importance to the global economy signifies nothing so long as one of us can drive really, really fast. It's been 11 years since Damon Hill won the driver's championship - the last time anyone but us much-derided petrolheads gave a monkey's wrench about Formula One. Now that Hamilton is heir apparent to the title, everyone is talking fuel strategies, and comparing engine sizes, and saying they're taking a pit stop when they're going to the loo.

Of course, there are considerable numbers of us for whom sport is simply a vent for dark, sadomasochistic tendencies, a sort of legitimised self-harm. Nothing else, frankly, can explain the Tour de France. Or, indeed, the British cult of failure. Both combined elegantly this past week when Bradley Wiggins led an astonishing breakaway during the sixth stage. Suffice it to say that it fulfilled the usual British requirements of being both insanely brave and, ultimately, futile. Wiggins was overpowered by the marauding peloton only 7km from the finish.

But all this is as nothing to the Beckhams' LA gold rush. A decent footballer arrives at a mediocre team seven time zones away and the story eats through the world's media like necrotising fasciitis. (I'd suggest that newspaper editors have got it wrong: the real sporting story here must be with Victoria, whose pouting has become so accomplished that she will soon, I am sure, bid to have it recognised as an Olympic discipline.) Here, surely, is the truly ancient spirit of sport, as noted two millennia ago by that most perspicacious of social commentators, Juvenal. Panem et circenses, folks: bread and circuses.

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