A world XI to prove good guys don't finish last

MICHAEL Schumacher's terrible accident forces us to consider the formidable complexities of his sporting achievement.

Michael Schumacher, the archetypal champion

MICHAEL Schumacher is a little better. We wish him well. His terrible accident forces us to consider the formidable complexities of his sporting achievement. He's been criticised, sure, but he has also been widely praised for his excesses. Champions are like that, people say. They have to be. Those who wish to be a champion must live by a different morality to the rest of us.

Good guys finish last. That's the theory. And it's not true. There are many great champions who got there without shattering the rules of their sport. There are a good few who do better than that: who make a genuine moral contribution to sport and to the world. Here is a Good Guys First XI.

1) Arthur Ashe

Ashe won the world's respect when he beat Jimmy Connors, the 1-10 favourite, in the 1975 Wimbledon final: out-thinking him, meditating in his chair at changeovers, showing that you don't need filthy manners to be a champion. He also championed the anti-apartheid cause. In retirement he had a heart attack and became HIV positive after a blood transfusion. He championed Aids awareness until his death in 1993.

2) Pele

The debate about whether Pele was a greater footballer than Diego Maradona ends when the football stops and the question of a larger morality comes in. Even in his playing days, Pele spoke up for the underprivileged. In retirement he set up legislation to cut down corruption in Brazilian football - the Pele Law - and became a UN ambassador for ecology and the environment and a Unesco goodwill ambassador. He is an unambiguously good-hearted man.

3) Sir Ian Botham

Botham is a man acquainted with scandal and wrongdoing, but he is also possessed by a deep need to do good deeds. He paid a visit to a hospital for treatment on a broken toe and walked into a children's ward by mistake, coming face to face with childhood leukaemia. So he started his ferocious walking; his first John O'Groats-Land's End epic was in 1985. At that time only 20 per cent of children with the disease survived; now it is 90 per cent. Botham the scapegrace has been a part of that; he is now president of Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research.

4) Carolina Kluft

Kluft was an unstoppably brilliant heptathlete, world champion three times and winner at the Athens Olympics of 2004, in a series of performances of blazing intensity.

She studied peace and development at university and always insisted that sport didn't really matter very much. She travelled with a toy Eeyore as a warning against sporting seriousness. She missed competing for a prize of $US100,000 in Monte Carlo because she had promised to visit an African child who she was sponsoring. She was furious when this became public - mainly because it was not "her" child but a valid human being in her own right.

5) Rafael Nadal

Nadal is not famous for deep thinking about the state of the world, though he does his bit for charity like many, if not most, champions. He makes this list because he has devoted his life to demonstrating that ruthlessness in sport can be isolated from ruthlessness in other aspects of life. In victory and defeat he has always been unfailingly gracious. The great and enthralling rivalries at the top of men's tennis in the past decade have been performed always with respect and generosity. All the top four are to be praised for this, but Nadal is the prime mover.

6) Muhammad Ali

There are many complexities and ambiguities in Ali's life, while much of his legend has been the work of saint-making revisionists. He was never part of the Civil Rights movement, for example; actively opposing integration and demanding a separate state for black people. He was caught up in turbulent times and took a stand, refusing to be drafted because he didn't have no quarrel with them Vietcong. In retirement and illness he turned against confrontation and devoted himself to good works.

7) Sachin Tendulkar

Tendulkar makes the list because it is hard to stay humble and sane when you are more or less worshipped as a god. Few people have timed a career so well: the rise of Tendulkar as a batsman went step by step with India's rise as an economic power. As a result, few athletes have had quite so many temptations, yet Tendulkar has resisted most of them. He leads a stable life, followed the late Sathya Sai Baba, makes late-night visits to temples to avoid being worshipped himself, sponsors underprivileged children, supports a cancer charity. He has managed the impossible: in a nation of a million gods, he stayed human.

8) David Beckham

Beckham was so famous he could have been a second George Best. He chose the other path, to become a family man, devoted to wife and children, refusing all offers of drink. He cheerily accepted his role as a gay icon. He is always up for a good deed for his country, for sport, for charities. There is much that is phony and irritating about the Beckham industry but the man himself has always tried to base what he does on honesty and decency.

9) Jonny Wilkinson

Wilkinson is here as sport's Job, the man who kept faith when anyone normal - anyone sane, it sometimes seemed - would have given up. His run of injuries after he kicked England to victory in the 2003 Rugby World Cup was unending and horrific: shoulder, ankle, knee, groin, appendix, kidney. He bore all this with extraordinary fortitude, eventually returned to rugby and is still playing like Jonny Unbound for Toulon.

10) Carl Hester

Hester is here for self-sacrifice, a rare virtue in a champion and a gold medal-winning athlete. Hester is co-owner of Valegro, the dressage horse. The horse had Olympic potential. He got Charlotte Dujardin, his stable-girl/pupil, to do the initial work, planning to take over himself in the traditional way. But Dujardin and Valegro struck an immediate soul-deep understanding - so Hester sacrificed the ride. Hester, riding a different horse, and Dujardin, with Valegro, were part of Britain's victorious dressage team at the London Olympics of 2012, but it was Dujardin and Valegro who won the gold.

11) Martina Navratilova

Navratilova is one of those people without much sense of moral ambiguity: if you believe something is right, you just do it. She is instinctively honest, likes true things, believes that we should all do our bit to make the world a fairer place. So naturally she was honest about her sexuality, stood up for gay rights, spoke out for any other cause that seemed to need it, and is a vegetarian. Like me, she is a patron of Save the Rhino. It's not just the causes, it's also that she has always instinctively tried to live life by doing the right thing.

I'm not putting any of these people up for canonisation. I'm not saying that they have never done wrong things. What I am saying is that they have all had a strong positive moral impact on the world in which they achieved great things. They have all shown us that success is not the exclusive preserve of bastards.

THE TIMES