Modern Use
"To do a Devon Loch" is a modern metaphor now sometimes used in sports and otherwise to explain a sudden, last-minute failure of teams or a sportsperson to complete an expected victory, for example: "Manchester United won't do a Devon Loch and lose the title after beating Chelsea" or "Lewis Hamilton surrendering the championship having led Kimi Räikkönen by 17 points with just two races remaining was a Devon Loch calamity". Another example occurred ahead of the 2011 Irish election when Seán Gallagher's campaign came undone in the final television debate his fall from grace was compared to Devon Loch's fall just before the winning post in the 1956 National.
In an article in The Times on 4 August 2012, Rick Broadbent wrote about the final day of the 2012 Olympics heptathlon competition: "Jessica Ennis is almost there. It would take a Devon Loch-style collapse to deny her the gold medal now."
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Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.”
—Nancy Banks-Smith, British columnist. Guardian (London, February 20, 1979)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)