Sport has always been a competition for physical supremacy, but many leading athletes today are discovering that it can play a radically deeper part in their lives: that sport can be their path to enlightenment. Ian Thompson: "I get out of running what a lot of people get out of going to church." Arthur Ashe: "It's like having a nervous breakdown but you don't care." David Hemery: "Sport can be a Western form of zen." The inner game is both a technique and a philosophy of sport. Tim Gallwey, author of "The Inner Game of Tennis", teaches Peter France the technique by means of a tennis lesson: "You learn control only when you lose control." Racing driver Jackie Stewart, tennis players Arthur Ashe and Mark Cox, cricketer Mike Brearley, marathon-runner Ian Thompson, hurdler David Hemery, report on their personal experiences of the wider philosophy: that sport is the ideal means of fusing body, mind and spirit; and can generate ecstatic states surprisingly similar to those described by religious mystics.