Thursday morning: school sports day. Thursday afternoon: visit to Tate Britain to see Martin Creed's Work No850, in which sprinters run the length of the gallery at 30-second intervals. I won't have been the first person to stand in the Tate and think: “My nine-year-old could do better than that.” But at least, in my case, the relevant comparison was fairly fresh in my mind.

Actually, in fairness, I'm not sure my nine-year-old could do better. The Tate's sprinters are adult running club members with big stride patterns and, one at a time, they fairly hammer down the marble floor of the Duveen Galleries, having been instructed by Creed to “sprint as if their lives depended on it”. I'll say this for sports day, though: it absolutely slaughtered Work No850 for excitement and entertainment value. I hung around the Tate for the best part of an hour and never worked out who was winning.

Nevertheless, we have no hesitation in acclaiming this new commission (which is to continue for four months) as the most significant coming together of sport and art since the National Portrait Gallery showed that hour-long video of David Beckham asleep. Not that we're entirely sure we understand it - or, more particularly, the point of it. But we felt a bit that way about the egg and spoon race, too.

Maybe you are a follower of Creed. Perhaps you thrilled to Work No227: The lights going on and off, an empty room in which, as advertised, the lights went on and off. Or maybe you were moved to the marrow by Work No79: Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball, and depressed against a wall. Creed won the Turner Prize - but you were probably ahead of me there.

Seeking further context and illumination, we bought a programme and learnt that “fundamentally, Work No850 investigates a basic human activity and is related to other works that Creed has made depicting vomiting, defecating and sex”. It's related, we should quickly point out, but not closely so, in the sense that the artist didn't arrange for people to enter the Tate at 30-second intervals and defecate/vomit/have sex. The other things were done on film, as we understand it.

We also read the following words of explanation from the artist. “Running is the opposite of being still,” Creed says. “Running fast is like the exact opposite of death: it's an example of aliveness.” Except when it's Dwain Chambers, of course.

Meanwhile, according to Stephen Deuchar, the director of Tate Britain, having these people in gym kit humming through the place at regular intervals “upsets any preconceived ideas of how to move appropriately through an art space”. Well, we're all in favour of an upset, here on the sports pages, and it's true that people don't, in the main, sprint through art galleries. But as upsets go, would this one qualify as a shock?

Also, is it really an “art space”? There are no pictures hanging in the Duveen Galleries, which essentially form a big passage through the middle of the Tate, with the picture rooms off to the sides. If the athletes were barrelling through while people were trying to look at things, instead of mildly crossing the hall, those preconceived ideas might be getting a decent rattle. As it is, the runners appear to be a kind of sideshow.

Still, Deuchar reckons that Work No850 “asks us to reassess a mundane activity as if it were an important event” and, with the 2012 Olympic Games just around the corner, he's probably right. That said, athletics? Mundane? Not at the sack race on Thursday morning. Now that was an important event.

....and not a cheep about Ronaldo

Even before the finals have been played and the titles allotted, those of us who care at all for tennis can surely agree that this has been a great Wimbledon. It took place under almost unrelenting quantities of peculiar, hard-to-identify golden stuff, which, after consulting meteorological experts, we eventually learnt to refer to as “sunshine” - and thus gave a timely boost to the spirits after the stop-start misery of the rain-drenched or so-called “brown Wimbledon” of 2007.

It had players warming up in clothes from their grandparents' wardrobes (cardigans, raincoats, tuxedos). It featured the first declared instance, in the modern era, of a victory inspired exclusively by the desire for revenge on another player's outfit (Alla Kudryavtseva on Maria Sharapova and her pleated shirt and shorts). And it gave us the spectacle of a British hopeful weeping buckets after getting through the first round (Elena Baltacha).

It yielded tennis from Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal that simply placed them in a different species. It gave us Chris Eaton - and almost as quickly took him away again. It produced the enlivening drama of an all-out seed crumble in the women's singles. And it brought together, for a rare public appearance, two legends of the game - Bruce Forsyth and Jimmy Tarbuck.

It was the context for the renaissance of Marat Safin after his long period in the wilderness (the so-called “steaming ears” years) - and if Safin can learn to enjoy Wimbledon, surely anyone can. In the Andy Murray versus Richard Gasquet late-night five-setter, it finally provided the BBC with an alternative to the Borg/McEnroe 1980 tape for rain delays in the future. And it meant that, for an entire fortnight, none of us had to talk about whether or not Cristiano Ronaldo was going to Real Madrid. We're really going to miss it.

Making Chelsea see red

It's the smart habit of the Amazon online store to offer customers recommendations for further purchases based on their shopping history. Sometimes this is a useful prompt, but the suppositions about the shopper's tastes made by the data-gathering software aren't always watertight. And so it is that people who buy Blue Pride, the DVD review of Chelsea's 2007-08 season, are being told, in no small letters by the Amazon website, that they “might also enjoy” The Double Champions - Manchester United Season Review 2007-08.

I don't think they would, though, do you? A chance to see again the failed title chase and the rain-drenched Champions League final penalty shoot-out in Moscow - but this time from the other side, with added cheering? Somehow I don't think that's where the Blue Pride buyer's next £12.98 is automatically going. In fact, I'm struggling to think of two more mutually exclusive purchases.

It's like offering vegetarians the opportunity to go on and snap up a whole, spit-ready pig. We need a new guideline, maybe. “If you like this, you really won't like that.”