British sport can have its own Berlin Wall moment
I will never forget the night the fell, exactly 20 years ago on 9 November - because it changed the face of world sport, as well as politics.
I was standing in the newsroom where I worked in the then German capital of , when my former colleague Martin Nesirky filed an urgent story from East Berlin. The old printer it emerged from went into alarm mode.
The story that flashed around the world in seconds had a simple message - East German citizens could now leave the country without a visa.
But what it really meant was that the Berlin Wall had just crashed down before our eyes. It took a few hours before everybody - and the guards on the wall particularly - understood what was happening.