It seems appropriate that in the Olympic year a biography should appear that commemorates great feats of athletic prowess. They don't come much more impressive than the 1928 Transcontinental Foot Race, which required its participants to run 40 miles across America daily for 80 consecutive days. The two participants Mark Whitaker follows are Arthur Newton, an intellectual-cum-farmer, and Peter Gavuzzi, a ship's steward. Neither won the race, but both had more at stake than merely winning medals.

The two men have been largely forgotten by history but Whitaker paints a compelling picture of a world in which the virtues of old-fashioned professionalism and decency overcome class and race barriers, even if both men were sometimes ostracised as professionals in a world of Oxbridge- trained amateurs. This is an engaging, surprising and, by the end, rather affecting book that becomes as much about lifelong friendship as it is about sport.