Double Olympic gold-medal winner, James Cracknell. His story before and after his life-changing accident.In October 2011 James Cracknell, two-time Olympic gold-medal rower and one of the greatest endurance athletes the world has ever known, suffered a seizure at home as his young son looked on in horror. A man who had known no limits, a man who had practically achieved the impossible, was now struggling to master life's simple challenges.A year earlier, as ...

The Golden Girl of British cycling opens up, for the first time, in searingly honest detail about what drives her to compete in a sport she no longer loves. Written with Donald McRae, 2 time winner of the William Hill Award, “Between the Lines” is THE Olympic autobiography.Victoria Pendleton MBE is not your typical female athlete.Admired as much by the weekly glossies as she is the newspaper back pages, she transcends her sport.In 2005 she became first British femal...

On 4 August 2012 Jessica Ennis kicked off what some described as the greatest night in British sporting history. For her it was the end of a long, winding, and sometimes harrowing road. Nobody was under more pressure at the London Olympics than 'the face of the Games'. Yet Jessica delivered the heptathlon gold medal, and the huge outpouring of relief she showed afterwards hinted at the roller-coaster journey she had been on. Behind the smiles and politeness, Jessica has endured much. Bulli...

One second in time may separate the great athlete from the merely good. Seb Coe has made every second count. From an early age he has been driven to be the best at everything he does. Since the moment Coe stood alongside a 'scrubby' municipal running track in Sheffield, he knew that sport could change his life. It did. Breaking an incredible twelve world records and three of them in just forty-one days, Seb became the only athlete to take gold at 1500 metres in two successive Olympic Games...

Fully updated to include Sir Chris Hoy’s incredible, record-breaking golds at London 2012 (making him his country’s greatest ever Olympian), this is the story of a sporting legend in his own words.This 33-year-old cycling fanatic from Murrayfield in the suburbs of Edinburgh defied the doubters who thought he would struggle when his specialist discipline, the 1km time trial, was dropped from the Olympics, and went on to reinvent himself as a track cycling sprinter and triple Olympic...

Ranulph Fiennes has travelled to the most dangerous and inaccessible places on earth, almost died countless times, lost nearly half his fingers to frostbite, raised millions of pounds for charity and been awarded a polar medal and an OBE. He has been an elite soldier, an athlete, a mountaineer, an explorer, a bestselling author and nearly replaced Sean Connery as James Bond.In his autobiography he describes how he led expeditions all over the world and became the first person to tr...

My eyes lifted to the horizon and the unmistakable snowy outline of Everest.Everest, the mountain of my childhood dreams. A mountain that has haunted me my whole life. A mountain I have seen hundreds of times in photographs and films but never in real life.In April 2018, seasoned adventurer Ben Fogle and Olympic cycling gold medallist Victoria Pendleton, along with mountaineer Kenton Cool, took on their most exhausting challenge yet – climbing Everest for ...

It is a fact generally acknowledged, dear reader, that a man is not a man without a dog . . .‘I have always been a pushover when it comes to dogs – something my own dogs worked out a long time ago. Who else can be relied on to be that excited about seeing you first thing, day in day out?’Mary, Tina and Arthur are the four-footed members of the Clunes family – scrapping, sleeping, leaping, wagging and licking. But there’s too much of the scrapping, and the hierarchy i...

Walking Home - Clare Balding's unmissable new book of Great British AdventuresClare Balding is on a mission to discover Britain and Ireland. She's conquered over 1,500 miles of footpaths, from the Pennine Way to the South-west Coast Path.As well as blisters and a twisted ankle, she's walked with extraordinary people - botanists, barefooted ramblers, whisky-drinking widowers...In Walking Home she shares these stories and tells of more (mis)adventure...

The son of a wrestler turned cycling coach called Killer Kowalski, Rob Hayles was soon winning races himself and realizing that he didn't really want to work for a living. The world of amateur club cycling in the 1990s was a long way from the millionaire sport of today though. When Rob first rode for Great Britain, it was with his own bike, one spare tyre, and a hand-me-down jersey.Yet Rob became an integral part of the amazing success story of British cycling, and has been at the ...

As well as starring on The Great British Bake Off, Mary Berry is returning to our TVs with her brand new series, Britain's Best Home Cook . . . so indulge, and discover her autobiography.From the moment she came into the world - two weeks early, throwing her parents' lives into disarray - Mary has gracefully but firmly done things her own way.Born in 1935, in the city of Bath, Mary's childhood was a curious mix of idyllic picnics and rambl...

Hodder & Stoughton admire Sir Mo's bravery in revealing his experience of being trafficked as a child. His memoir TWIN AMBITIONS, published in 2013, is based on the story he felt able to tell at the time, which we understood to be the true version of events. It is now clear that Sir Mo did not wish to share some of his difficult early experiences and we respect the decisions he made both then and now.4 August, 2012. Super Saturday. On the most elec...