OTHER SPORTS:THE CRASH and burn of Kenny Egan, Ireland's most successful off-the-conveyor belt Olympic medallist, is the Christmas biography you don't want the kids scrolling through; an oft X-rated biography and unique in its own way.

Alternatively embarrassing, honest, destructive, funny and hopeful, Kenny Egan: My Story (Paperweight, €12.99) often shows Egan in a poor light and clouded by misjudgment. A positive thing for a book, although, not necessarily for the Beijing Olympic silver medallist.

A page-turning antidote to the yawn biographies the book doesn’t try to feint or weave. It pulls no punches. It ducks no fights, is not self serving. It is Egan unplugged. The Irish captain is on a drinking binge in New York when he should have been in Dublin captaining the Irish team.

He downloads a wad of cash from the EBS, arrives with his friend at the airport and takes the first flight of fancy. He arrives in the Big Apple in a tee-shirt and jeans, holes up in the Chelsea Hotel and, voila, we have a full blown Fairytale of New York.

His unembellished life as a handsome, single professional athlete often steals the show. Taking horses from travellers near his native Neilstown, racing cars around industrial estates at weekends, snorting cocaine, one-night stands and visiting brothels in the Philippines because of boredom in an Irish training camp captures his struggle with drink, dubious choices and ultimately his crowning success and the Beijing nirvana.

Gary Keegan, the high performance director emerges as an intelligent, driven man going far beyond the call of duty to save Egan from himself. Where is he now? Head coach Billy Walsh too is no man for knee-jerk moral outrage. But even exasperated by indiscipline, he protects and guides Egan and his other fighters as boxing moves from a ragbag organisation into the trim, motivated team it is now.

A book of honesty and pain, of success and failure, of lacking confidence and having too much, of fearing the dream, chasing it and in the end living it and surviving it, Egan consistently lets himself down and somehow scrambles on.

But this is not a lugubrious tale. You do not emerge dolefully concerned for Egan as you may after reading footballer Paul McGrath’s story. Rather you’re caught by Egan’s escapades and boorish, flawed agenda. It’s impossible to judge him and easy to like him. A lot of his life has been venal and thoughtless, some illegal and morally equivalent and he gives us a peak. But he has seemed to pull together which makes the book hopefully triumphant.

Ewan MacKenna’s effortless narrative works well, stylistically. The binge interspersed with his life story moves the book forward easily. Off drink and with a possible Olympic Games in seven months Egan’s story isn’t quite over.

Barry McGuigan went to the desert in Las Vegas in 1986, fought 15 rounds and lost his world crown to a local called Steve Cruz.

It was 110 degrees in the car park in Caesars Palace. The boy from Clones should never have been there. These were the days of Betamax tapes. Bob Geldof and Paula Yates were in the crowd that day.

One of the best loved fighters of his generation, Barry McGuigan – Cyclone My Story(Virgin, €14.99) moves through his life from humble amateur beginnings and his world triumph in Loftus Road, the death of African boxer Young Ali, which had a profound effect on him, and on to his demise in Vegas.

Many people may now know McGuigan as a boxing commentator and analyst as well as the man who famously prepared Daniel Day-Lewis for his role in the The Boxer in 1997. He didn’t hang around talking about the old days. It’s now 25 years since he lost to Cruz and since then he has become an establishment figure. An MBE in 1996, an ambassador for Laureus and a big giver to charity, it’s a heart-warming story.

Perhaps, though McGuigan is too unflawed and responsible to have “whoa” factor. His biographical portrait is that of a venerable family man, who has done much in his life, and perhaps more than we understand walked a difficult line in a divided province during the worst years.

From the modest “Thank you very much Mr Eastwood” boxer, who captured the nation in the 1980s and could hardly believe his luck in rising to the top, McGuigan has become a sporting ambassador. Few will begrudge him that.

Unadorned, this latest collection from the late George Kimball is harvested from his various columns in The Irish Times, Boston Herald,TheSweetScience.com and BoxingTalk.com.

As ever with the big man, Kimball borrows from all of the things that interested him throughout his fully occupied life. He loved Ireland, film, literature and his time was the counter culture years of the 1960s when he also wrote for Rolling Stone magazine.

Kimball’s strength is that he was never, ever schmaltzy in his writing. Old school, he held a healthy respect and jaundiced eye over most things boxing, which he was part of for four decades and 400 title fights.

They do not come like Kimball any more, and given the way reporting has changed his work may soon be considered of another time. But boxing fans will dive into over 360 pages of ringside observations, anecdotes and big fight skullduggery, everything that makes the seedy, duplicitous world of boxing what it is.

George Kimball – Manly Art: Despatches from Ringside(Transworld, €14.99) is a dip-in compilation and in that sense a lucky bag with all the favourites.

How to react to a book? Gerard Hartmann – Born To Perform: How sport has shaped my life (Orpen Press, €16.99) is a book about Hartmann, no doubt about that.

The pages are his views in life, sport, physical therapy. The “I” word appears a lot, which for a biography is normal but its use very much focuses everything on Hartmann in a sense of him being almost all knowing, or, certainly all thinking and opinionated.

He is a remarkably positive individual and his infectious lust for life and improvement is evident in just about every page.

His chosen path of fixing up other athletes is not just a job, but a life work, a passion. And if the energy from the book translates into Hartmann’s flesh and bones then he’s a hyperactive individual with a keen sense of perfection.

This doesn’t make him a likeable, or dislikable, former champion tri-athlete and physio to the stars, but someone who is quirky, indefatigable and outside the mainstream. Those qualities draw admiration and have gotten him to the top of his profession.

A remarkable man, the book occasionally reads like a US self-help book full of zesty life observations and quotes from Rudyard Kipling’s poem If. Hartmann seems to have found a secret of sorts. He appears to have found the key to unlock not just the bodies of top athletes but their minds too. All royalties go to Console, a suicide prevention and care charity.

The fine columns of Nicolas Roche, when published in various newspapers, gave a raw insight into life as a professional cyclist. It’s a sport that promotes sacrifice above acclaim. Roche’s diaries had an immediacy and attraction that is extremely rare from athletes in any sport, who are still current.

In book form – Nicolas Roche – Inside the Peloton(Transworld Ireland, €15.99) – that style does assume a relentless quality. Then again that is the nature of the beast. Professional cyclists ride 200 kilometres in driving rain or 40 degrees or both, have dinner, sleep and do the same the next day. It is attritional and more oil and grime than podiums or adulation.

But Roche imparts both a big picture of a particular lifestyle that’s all-consuming and a small one of daily struggle and pain. He describes the grind of the sport, the day-to-day events that are equally lousy and savage and devoid of romantic notions; a slaughter house on wheels.

The details are book ended between biographical details of his family life that are not in-depth, his father Stephen more of a constant, advising voice.

We get the blood and guts of the peleton and for cycling fans that inside account of the job is one to slavishly lap up.