What was Dennis Taylor, the Northern Irish snooker titan, thinking when he placed a special order for spectacles that came halfway up his forehead? And what did Jimmy White, the “people’s champion” who never quite beat Taylor, have in mind when he changed his name to Jimmy Brown? The answer to both questions is not much, if a study of the academic capabilities of top sportsmen and women is to be believed. But it is not to be believed. Professional snooker players were ranked last despite their talents for instant arithmetic and intuitive geometry, while cyclists, golfers, rowers and track and field athletes were ranked brightest despite the crude simplicity of their sports, to wit (in reverse order): running, jumping, heaving, thwacking and — in those rare moments of Tour de France excitement — falling down.

This study was based on academic qualifications. As such, what it really measured was caution and recklessness: the caution of the oarswoman who knows she will never earn a living from sliding up and down her floating torture chamber and so studies diligently for her accountancy exams; and the recklessness of the snooker genius who knows he will never have to earn a living from anything else, so spends his teens succumbing to the sweet caress of green baize and fluted ash.

Freddie Flintoff (left school to play for Lancashire) won’t complain that cricket ranks fifth out of twelve, even if Mike Brearley (Cambridge degree) feels dragged down by the lumpen bowlertariat. Still, as a psychoanalyst he must know that genius can’t be measured, and, as a classicist, that scans can matter more than scansion.