The main Northern Hemisphere winter team sports are building towards their respective finales, but with much remaining to fight for.

Meanwhile, the summer sports are just starting to get under way, stimulating all the hopes and anticipation one associates with a new season.

It wasn’t always altogether like this.

Before sporting seasons started to converge, under pressure from commercial operators intent on maximising returns, this embarrassment-of-riches overlap period was more fleeting.

This made it possible for athletes to contemplate parallel careers in two sports.

I can just about remember Jim Cumbes and Chris Balderstone, who must have been among the last simultaneous footballer-cricketers, talented enough to perform in both the Football League and the County Championship.

Cumbes kept goal in the 1960s and 1970s for Tranmere Rovers, West Bromwich Albion and Aston Villa, while also operating as a more-than-useful seam bowler for, among others, Surrey and Worcestershire.

Balderstone enjoyed a long football career at about the same time with Carlisle United. He also played cricket for Leicestershire as a fluent upper middle-order batsman, winning two England caps.

He once, in 1975, played county cricket and league football on the same day, a remarkable feat, but one which also underlined how this sort of dual career was probably destined to fade into history in sport’s modern era of ultra-professionalism.

Balderstone and Cumbes were following a well-trodden path, taken with distinction by, among others, Leslie and Denis Compton, who served both Arsenal and Middlesex with great skill over many years.

Earlier still in organised sport’s process of development, when standards were broadly lower and  many top performers were gentleman amateurs, such exploits of versatility were probably even more plentiful.

The achievements of Charles Burgess Fry in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras are often cited as the epitome of the genre: Fry played cricket for England, represented Southampton FC in the 1902 FA Cup final and once equalled the world long jump record.

Among athletes whose feats of versatility include an Olympic component, one of the most remarkable rolls of honour must be that compiled during the 1950s, the middle of the Franco era, by a handsome young Spanish nobleman, the Marquess of Portago.

Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Angel Blas Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton to imbue him (just this once) with his full name, finished fourth in an Olympic final, third in a Cheltenham Gold Cup, the top-ranked steeplechase in the British horseracing calendar, and second in a British Grand Prix.

He is reported to have once won a $500 bet by flying an aircraft under a London bridge.

The same article describes him as an accomplished swimmer and jai alai player; I have also seen him credited as a Davis Cup player for Spain, though I have been unable to corroborate this.

Oh, and his father is said to have died during half-time at a polo match.

Chronologically the first of Portago’s three main exploits touched on above came at Cheltenham.

This was in 1950 when he partnered a horse called Garde Toi to third place in the race in which Cottage Rake completed a notable hat-trick of Gold Cup victories.

A few weeks later, he was at Aintree to ride the same horse over the then fearsome Liverpool fences against 48 rivals.

As top weight, he may well have led the parade on an occasion attended by royalty, since it marked the first time the royal colours had been worn in the race for 42 years.

Portago and Garde Toi lasted only as far as what is now called the Foinavon fence, however.

Two years later, he returned with a new horse called Icy Calm and made it three-quarters of the way through the marathon race before pulling up at Canal Turn on the second circuit.

In 1956, Portago was a member of the Spanish team at the Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, which is now hoping to host the 2026 Winter Games.

He had been taught how to bobsled by an American called Edmund Nelson, whom he had met while living in New York’s Plaza hotel.

Portago competed in both two- and four-man events at Cortina d’Ampezzo; it was in the former that he excelled, missing out on a bronze medal to a Swiss team by just 0.14 seconds over four runs.

The following year, he showed this was no flash in the pan, winning bronze in the same event at the World Championships in St Moritz.

By July, he had moved on to the Silverstone motor-racing circuit in Northamptonshire, where he was driving his Ferrari in fifth place at around the halfway point of the British Grand Prix, wearing what one report described as a "wonderful pokerface expression".

A few laps later, Portago’s team-mate Peter Collins, lying third, was forced to retire with an overheating engine.

Collins was permitted to take over the Spaniard’s vehicle, which he piloted to second place, credited equally to both drivers, behind the peerless Argentinian, Juan Manuel Fangio.

That same year, Portago won a 6,000 kilometres Tour de France car rally, ahead of Stirling Moss, in spite of suffering a broken windscreen in St Etienne. 

It was also motor-racing that caused Portago’s desperately premature death, accompanied by his old friend Nelson, back in Italy in 1957 at the age of just 28, however.

Thirty miles before the end of the famous Mille Miglia, his car suffered a high-speed tyre blowout and catapulted into the air, killing nine spectators as well as its occupants.

An evocative Sports Illustrated piece by William Rospigliosi told the story of the race.

"They liked his good looks, his shiny mop of curly black hair, his devil-may-care attitude about many sports," Rospigliosi reported, referring to the roadside crowd.

"They called him uno simpaticone.

"They were with him."