Has there ever been an athlete, male or female, quite like Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of all time? She is like something from another planet, so out of this world are the body-bending tricks she can accomplish on the floor, vault and bars. These are incomprehensible feats of agility, strength and grace, which were once the territory of the communist countries who could bully their young athletes into doing all sorts of outrageous manoeuvres on lethal-looking pieces of equipment. But not these days: it’s a sport for the world and Biles is its queen.

Biles is very human: she has had trouble with the gymnast’s equivalent of the ‘yips’ – known as the ‘twisties’ – when she couldn’t tell up from down, a condition familiar to many journalists, and had to take time out. Far worse, she was abused by Larry Nassar, the US gymnasts’ team doctor who was sentenced to 300 years for sexually assaulting children and possessing child pornography.

Biles, who comes from Spring, Texas (a particularly cheering example of nominative determinism), and spent some years in care before being adopted at six by Ronald and Nellie Biles, whom she always credits with her success. Chasteningly for most of us who can’t get out of a car without grunting, she performs her astounding feats with great élan, charm and a warm smile; she is an object lesson to sports people all over the world.

Last weekend she dominated the World Championships, bringing her total of medals to 37 across all competitions. With the Olympics coming up next year, only a fool would bet against her adding to her haul. And nobody would deserve it more.

Moving swiftly from the sublime to the considerably less so, it would be good if England rugby’s World Cup coach Steve Borthwick would find a captain who could tell the time. England didn’t deserve to beat Samoa in the last pool game. Samoa were appreciably the better side and refereed out by a busybody TMO who disallowed two tries, one absurdly late and with no good reason.

This meant that Owen Farrell’s extraordinary loss of concentration when he didn’t manage to kick a penalty in the permitted time didn’t really matter. Maybe the pressure gets to him: it certainly did in the warm-up to the toss in the 2019 World Cup final when England lost heavily to the Springboks. But what we do know about Borthwick is that he is very much a straight lines kind of guy, a meat-and-two-veg bloke, so we’re unlikely to see much in the way of radical surgery for the quarter-final against Fiji this weekend.

That’s the same Fiji who were beaten by Portugal, seemingly a team of hairdressers and part-time postmen, in what was the most enjoyable game of the whole World Cup: a return to proper schoolboy rugby where the big blokes push and the fast blokes pass and run. Those were the days.

What baffles me is why the so- called ‘minnows’ aren’t allowed to play on. The third-place teams could contest a plate, while the fourths contested a vase. This would mean Italy playing Scotland, with the winner taking on the winner of Australia and Japan. For the vase, Uruguay or Tonga would play the winner of Portugal and Samoa. That gives six more matches, and mostly between teams you would like to see again. It would be a rugby festival and would help grow the game, something the sport seems remarkably loath to do.

Finally, for all those of you who like puffing around a brisk Parkrun every Saturday, how’s this to make you feel small? A nine-year-old from Poole, Louis Robinett, has just knocked off his local 5k course in 17 mins 40 secs. Difficult to contemplate that, as we strap on our trainers.