ONCE in a while, you see a sporting moment of such amazing quality and beauty that you just know you will never forget.

It can be a moment of great significance, or it can be a piece of sporting genius you know that you could never repeat in a million months of Sundays.

Very rarely does it happen at 11.30pm on a Monday night during a football match where the ball is out of play because a goal has already been scored.

Those of you who watched the BBC's coverage of the African Nations Cup this week will know exactly what I'm talking about.

The Nigerian goal-scorer, Julius Aghahowa, managed possibly the most outrageous goal celebration of all time, with seven back-flips and a roll before stopping to take the applause of a stunned crowd.

It's the kind of thing that I just know will pop into my head and cheer me up in the coming months and years.

Yet if that had happened in one of the ice dancing disciplines at next month's Winter Olympics I wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

Sure, I love the Winter Olympics.

Any sport which involves immense physical danger (not to mention extreme unpredictability) is well worth watching.

Personally, I'll be gawping over the short track speed-skating with the best of them.

But I'll give the other major event in the Salt Lake City ice arena a complete miss.

Somehow, ice dancing just doesn't seem like a sport.

At first, the fact that it was judged subjectively seemed to be the stumbling block.

After all - sport is about achieving an objective, be it scoring more goals than the opposition, running fastest, climbing highest.

But gymnastics, diving and, in part, ski jumping all work on the same principle and they are all, undoubtedly, sports.

Is it a Torvill and Dean allergy? Sure, the most bizarre 'sports personality of the year' may have less in the way of looks, intelligence, sporting ability, not to mention personality, than that competition's second oddest winner, Red Rum, but surely Katrina Witt's charisma more than cancels out their annoying smugness?

No, I think the problem is this.

Sports people should wear clothes that are functional (the Cameroon team's sleeveless football jerseys may well be the way forward, though they might look a touch out of place on a cold Tuesday night at the Axe).

They serve some sort of a purpose - either to sell advertising or protect the wearer from harm.

The odd white football boot is bad enough, but when a so called athlete steps out wearing frilly tassels and spangly trousers, they forfeit any right they might have once had to call themselves a serious sportsperson.

Don't do it, kids!