Between them the 11 horses have won 81 races and over $50m in purses

Between them the 11 horses have won 81 races and over $50m in purses.And in the land where cement mixers never sleep and buildings seem to sprout daily, it seems the animal who will emerge triumphant is Cigar. When Godolphin, Halling’s trainers, hired Tom Albertrani from the Cigar camp they asked him how the great horse could be chopped down “There is only one way to beat Cigar,” he replied. “Close your eyes and dream it.”Dubai World Cup (Nad Al Sheba, Wednesday) Ladbrokes: 5-4 Cigar, 7-2 Halling, 4-1 Pentire, 7-1 Tamayaz, 10-1 L’Carriere, 12-1 Danewin, 14-1 Soul Of The Matter, 20-1 Larrocha, 50-1 Torrential, 66-1 Needle Gun, 100-1 Lively Mount. Both are, according to my colleagues on the Sports desk, “sweet, tall and nicely formed”, but crushes on footballers are anathema to my generation Boys had crushes on footballers, not girls. But the advent of opera, weeping Gazzas, spades of money and the prevalence?? had made soccer players safe. Wonders will never cease.So what are the ingredients that make a teen heart-throb? Well, look at this list and common factors become apparent.

The only film star is Brad Pitt, the callipygian beauty on whom quite a lot of grown-up girlies also have crushes. They are Jamie Redknap of Liverpool FC and Trevor Sinclair of QPR. One doubts, however, that the teen market covets him for his magnificent performance as a bearded, brain-dead mass-murderer in Kalifornia.The last two are interesting. All it takes is appealing to the strongest character in each girlie gang and you’re going to go straight in at Number 1.So who does the current crop of early teens rate as prime meat? According to Sugar magazine , the top 10 faces that make hearts go pit-a-pat this year are: in the pop world, Ronan Keating from Boyzone, the band who are taking up the slack left by Take That with their cover versions of, among other things, the Osmonds’ “Love Me For a Reason”; Damon Albarn, the perky, well-washed frontman from Blur; Liam Gallagher, surly singer in Oasis, and Gaz Coombes, the Supergrass singer whose sideburns are copyright of Planet of the Apes.Hot telly properties are Matt le Blanc, the intellectually-challenged actor, Joey, in Friends; Jared Lito, a Matt Dillon/James Dean hybrid who sulked his way through the excellent but ill-fated My So-Called Life, and Paul Nichols, who played a heart-throb in the BBC kids’ series The Biz and is about to boost EastEnders’ ratings when he joins its cast tonight. Shelley and Byron were pursued by crowds of squealing groupies.

Roman hearts swelled at the sight of a well-formed gladiator. Chivalry and courtly love were crushes taken to their most formalised extreme: look but don’t touch; pine away for love; fantasise until you’re hot.
By the mid-20th century, business had harnessed the phenomenon for profit. Where previous generations had swooned for men of action, my mother went overboard about Laurence Olivier in Fire Over England – “when he jumped out of that window onto the horse, ohhh…” – Leslie Howard as Pimpernel Smith, a sort of 1940s Indiana Jones, and Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind. My friend Elva remembers lying awake in Canada with her tinny radio under the pillow in the hope of hearing Frank Sinatra’s voice.My first crush was Dr Spock in Star Trek I was seven. Later I graduated to Sonny Osmond (you had to b e there), Kurt Russell in his buckskins in The Brothers and David Soul in Starsky and Hutch Everybody else was in love with them too. Crushes are almost completely tribal until you’re over the hump of 14, which explains the phenomenal profits turned by the boy bands. The girls are younger these days, but the heart-throb is as old as the hills.

A crush is a wonderful outlet for the imagination: ever conducted conversations and snogging sessions with those phantoms who peopled the walls of your bedroom? And, given that most girls reach puberty while boys are still torturing insects, crushes are an essential outlet for all those burgeoning sex urges. Throughout them, you hone your picture of the kind of bloke (or, of course, girl), you’re after. You experience the mating urge at safe enough a distance from its object that the physical complications are limited. Crushes, those hot flushes that consume pre-and-post pubescent girls, are essential to the maturing process. Naturally, Graf was not entirely satisfied with her performance.

“I think it was a pretty solid match, but maybe sometimes on my return I did not step into my slices as often as I should, so that’s the only thing I would criticise,” she said.Having dispensed with one American Fernandez, Graf is faced with another. She now plays Gigi’s former doubles partner, Mary Joe.Andre Agassi, the men’s defending champion, teetered on Saturday night before winning his opening match 6-4, 1-6, 7-6, against Germany’s Bernd Karbacher, ranked No 49. Agassi, the No 3 seed, appeared lethargic at times, even though the draw had opened up before he arrived on court, Boris Becker withdrawing due to illness and Thomas Muster again finding the No 1 ranking to be a banana skin.Sampras, who will return to No 1 if he wins the title, advanced to the fourth round with a 7-5, 7- 6 victory against Jakob Hlasek, of Switzerland Sampras next plays his American compatriot Todd Martin.. The American won an encounter on grass in Sydney in 1983, Graf making amends on a rubberised concrete court at Indian Wells, California, two years ago.Few would have guessed that they had experienced so little of each other’s shots when the fourth game unfolded yesterday.