The Decadent Sportsman

Author: Durian Gray, Medlar Lucan

Edited by: Jerome Fletcher, Alex Martin   Cover design: Marie Lane   Cover illustration: Paul Kilsby  

From their offices above a boxing gym in Old Havana, Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray have set aside their congenital lethargy to begin a glittering and fantastical new project: The Decadent Sportsman.

"We are inspired in part by the magnificent wastefulness of the preparations for the London Olympic Games, exactly the kind of futile extravagance that Caligula or Nero would have adored, and in part by the pungent odours of sweat and bruised leather that waft up through the ventilation grillles in the floorboards from the boxing ring below."

This orchid-scented duo bring their wit and monstrous imaginations to play across the entire history of sport, with chapters ranging from the Greek athletic ideal and its perversions to the Nazi Olympics of 1936 and the use of drugs, alcohol and visionary states of being.

The book also includes the full text of their proposal to the IOC for a new and more impressive Alternative Olympic Games, with events such as voyeurism, dentistry, Russian roulette, cocktail mixing, posing, couture, hairdressing, mendacity, bohemianism, architectural pâtisserie, and the roasting and carving of meat.