The Decadent Sportsman

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. 'Lucan and Gray, whose fruity monikers may strike some as being suspiciously apt, have concocted a fabulous and shocking assemblage.' Christopher Hirst in The Independent ' For those unacquainted with Lucan and Gray's act, the pseudonymous pair write in character as two peripatetic Wildean flaneurs, driven by the stylistic flair and pleasure seeking values of the late 19 th century Decadent and Aesthetic movements.' Oliver Bennett in The Independent on Sunday - Book of the Week Choice At long last, however, I have discovered an antidote to my cynicism in the form of the Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray's Decadent series. Natasha Hughes in The Traveller Magazine