There are exceptions, but top sport tends by and large not to produce top art.

I can think of at least two reasons for this:

● Top sport is about success, or at least, that is where our main focus lies; to an artist, failure is usually more interesting.

● The most breathtaking sports achievements are memorable precisely because they are almost unbelievable; it follows that if you invent something similar, credulity is strained.

Noted art critic (and sometime cricketer) Graham Gooch put his finger on this second issue in the summer of 1986 when he reacted to Ian Botham's feat of taking a wicket with his first ball back in Test cricket after a three month absence.

"Who writes your bloody script then?" he inquired as the England team gathered in a happy huddle.

In this context, I think the gigantic new bronze statue of Zinedine Zidane in front of Paris's Pompidou Centre is particularly interesting.

Not yet having seen the piece, - which shows the French playmaker in the act of head-butting Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the 2006 FIFA World Cup final at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin - I am not qualified to assess its artistic quality.

But how fascinating that the artist, Adel Abdessemed, should have alighted on this moment rather than one of many sublime footballing episodes from Zizou's career.

Ian Botham (centre) had the help of a script writer, according to England's Graham Gooch

This is a man, after all, whose two goals for France in the 1998 World Cup final had led to his image being beamed onto the Arc de Triomphe, the pre-eminent monument to French nationhood.

He also helped his team, Real Madrid, to capture the 2002 European Cup in Glasgow by notching the decisive goal in a 2-1 win over Germany's Bayer Leverkusen with one of the sweetest volleys ever struck.

As one fortunate enough to have witnessed every single minute of that 2006 French World Cup campaign, I think the artist is right though. Let me try to explain why.

Things could hardly have started more sluggishly for the French, who had fluffed their lines as reigning champions at the previous World Cup in 2002, managing one draw and not a single goal in three matches.

The impression four years later, rightly or wrongly, was that the "barons", the veteran survivors of the 1998 World Cup-winning squad, including Zidane, were doing pretty much as they pleased and at first, it seemed, they were no longer up to it.

"[Manager] Raymond Domenech is a likeable enough man, steeped in football culture," I wrote after Les Bleus had started with disappointing draws againstSwitzerland and South Korea.

"But on the touchline here he has exuded the impotency of a country schoolmaster trying to stop his class running riot."

The statue depicting Zinedine Zidane's infamous head-butt on Marco Materazzi

Zizou had contrived somehow to get himself sent off in that second match.

More importantly, he was playing as if bored out of his shaven skull.

"He has been playing as if from memory, wearing the beatific expression of a martyred saint," I wrote.

"He mainly strides past the media as if alone in a room.

"When he picked up bookings, seemingly through absentmindedness, in France's first two matches, it was as if he had devised a painless way of ending a phase of his life that had ceased to stimulate him."

Then suddenly, following a still unconvincing 2-0 win over Emmanuel Adebayor's Togo that Zidane played no part in because he was suspended, everything changed.

He was a key man, along with fellow baron Patrick Vieira, in a rather surprising 3-1 win over Spain.

The actual head-butt incident during the 2006 World Cup final between France and Italy

Moreover, as he walked off the pitch arm in arm with goalkeeper Fabien Barthez, grinning from ear to ear, Zizou seemed to have recovered his joie de vivre.

He confirmed this in the quarter-final win over Brazil, giving a performance of sustained virtuosity that remains the best individual display I have seen in an international football match.

Victory over Portugal in the semi-final, secured with a Zidane penalty off two paces, was never in doubt.

By the time he had put his team ahead, again from the penalty spot, after just seven minutes of the final against an Italian team entitled to be feeling drained after an epic win over host-nation Germany, it was starting to appear as if the planets had fallen into line and the best player France has ever produced would duly stride off to his seat among the sport's immortals after lifting the World Cup for the second time in three attempts.

Two hours later and this gathering sense of cosmic inevitability had been obliterated by the most famous head-butt in recorded history.

Even as a moment of madness that exposed a candidate for god-hood as a flesh and blood figure just like the rest of us, it might justify a 15-foot-plus bronze statue.

But I think there is more to it than that.

We didn't know at the time why he had done it.

Once it was revealed that Materazzi had said something about his sister, then it became possible to vest the incident with a similar sense of tragedy to that which drove the plot-lines of the Spanish Golden Age dramas I used to study.

Under this sort of reading, Zidane's violent reaction could be construed not as a rush of blood, but an act of retribution tragic because of the severity of the repercussions but also because the perpetrator's finely developed sense of honour made it inevitable, even obligatory.

It is, in short, just the type of moment that cries out to be immortalised in art.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed by clicking here.