Homily for Mass of the Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A, Sydney, 3 September 2023

He was at the height of his powers going into the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. The British sprinter, Derek Redmond, held the British record over 400m and the year before was on the relay team that upset the red-hot US squad, winning the world championships. His Olympic campaign couldn’t have started better: he blitzed the field in his qualifying heat and made light work of the quarter-final. He was in such fine form that pundits thought him a certainty for the podium and an odds-on favourite for gold.