"We think that they're less the liberal intelligentsia, more rent-a-mob." She adds, for the record, that Imran Khan shoots, Ian Botham goes flyfishing (more upmarket than the declasse coarse fishing) and Allan Lamb hunts and fishes: gentlemanly pursuits all.Tony Mason believes that a lot of sports snobbery is fuelled by a misplaced nostalgia about ''gentlemanly'' virtues that never truly existed Perhaps. "In the 1920s it became a working men's sport: it was the first spectator sport that the general public could take part in." The dogs, however, were still owned by the upper crust: now there is a complicated irony in people such as arch-mockney Damon Albarn owning a mutt called Honest Guv.However, attempts at making the "noble art" of boxing more respectable have failed "All this lords, ladies and gentlemen rubbish," says Mason. "In the Middle Ages greyhounds were only allowed to be owned by the landed gentry," says Frank Melville, chief executive of the National Greyhound Racing Club. Fifty years ago, Rugby Union was Oxbridge, but now all sections of the community play, and players are chosen on merit."Others sports deemed terminally gorblimey may also be upwardly mobile. "The lower end are just as interested in the discos." Not for them the pleasures of going off-piste at Klosters.Despite the old divide between League (working-class, northern, professional) and Union (middle-class, southern, amateur) rugby is classless, so says a senior member of the Rugby Football Union "All of the perceived antagonism has long gone," he says "League and Union sides even play each other.

"It started snowballing in the 1970s, when schools started taking groups of children,"says Tessa Coker of the Ski Club of Great Britain. Package deals also contributed, and now, she says: "Few people think of skiing as a toff thing." Nevertheless, she thinks there may be class differences in the approach to skiing. "The middle classes tend to see it as a sport rather than a holiday," she says. "Look somewhere else," thunders John Crisp of the Hurlingham Polo Association "It's often described as elitist and that simply isn't true. Of course, there's a royal association, but anyone can learn to play." Might there be a prohibitive cost? "Well, if you ask Kerry Packer, then yes But there are different levels.