Anyone with a heart is bound to feel sadness at Boris Becker’s fall | Tim Adams

The urge to win at everything never left him, long after his sporting career was over

Looking back on his young self, all that irrepressible boyish power, Boris Becker once observed: When you are a teenager, you are looking for your own identity, and winning is a way of expressing yourself. And because I thought in victory I became somebody, in defeat, it followed I was nobody."

No doubt, as Becker negotiates his first weekend of a two-and-a-half year jail sentence in Wandsworth prison - just a couple of miles from his Wimbledon triumphs - he will have cause, at 54, to examine the true nature of those extremes. The highest level of sporting stardom is the closest contemporary life gets to Greek myth and fatal flaws never make easy viewing.

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