In David Miller’s pomp, a journey to a great sporting event could become as exotic as an Alan Whicker travelogue. He reached the 1964 Tokyo Olympics not by air but via the Trans-Siberian Railway, followed by a ferry trip from Vladivostok to Japan. He rated his favourite hotel in the world as The Oriental in Bangkok, where the suites were named after literary guests from Joseph Conrad to Somerset Maugham. While his taste for grandeur could not be indulged indefinitely by newspaper expenses policies, his wanderlust never faded. “Where are you today, David?” a Telegraph sub-editor asked him when, well into his 70s, he rang in for his nightly check call. “Guatemala City.”

The doyens of this industry typically achieved such stature through their devotion to a single sport. You think of Brian Glanville in football, Christopher Martin-Jenkins in cricket, Henry Longhurst in golf. But Miller was unusually multi-dimensional, forging such indelible associations across sports that he attended not only 14 World Cup finals, but 25 Olympics, summer and winter. That dual allegiance owed much to his own athletic pedigree. He counted it among his few regrets that he never made it to the 1956 Games in Melbourne as a competitor, his place on the Great Britain football team withdrawn only when the squad size was cut for cost reasons.

Miller’s death, at the age of 91, sadly ensures that England’s solitary World Cup triumph in 1966 retreats ever further into the realm of sepia. He was there on that sun-drenched Wembley afternoon, producing the match report for The Sunday Telegraph, where he captured Geoff Hurst’s hat-trick goal with such precision that you feel, even reading it today, a witness to something monumental. “Slowly the minutes ticked away, almost agonisingly,” he wrote, “until, with the referee looking at his watch, Hurst staggered on alone from yet one more of Bobby Moore’s velvet passes, to hit the ball into the roof of the net with the little strength he had left.”

Amid such elation and euphoria, a 31-year-old journalist could scarcely have guessed that the nation would still be waiting, six decades later, for an encore. One by one, the cast list of ’66 are leaving us. James Mossop, Miller’s press-box colleague, died eight months ago at 89, having bequeathed his all-timer of an anecdote about partying with Jack Charlton in Mayfair the night England lifted the Jules Rimet Trophy. Miller cultivated more of a patrician image, his impact measured more by connections made than by evenings spent carousing. At the ’66 tournament alone, he gave Pelé and eight Brazil team-mates a lift in his Ford Consul, dropping them off at Leicester Square for some entertainment before their flight home.

He developed his own writing style, light on embellishment, even if he admired the lyricism of a peer such as Hugh McIlvanney. One night in deepest South America, he awoke to find his room-mate calling The Observer at £6 a minute, correcting a comma to a semi-colon in the 23rd paragraph. At heart, he saw himself more as a reporter than as a trenchant polemicist, earning particular praise for his coverage of the Heysel disaster in 1985, where his dispatches on the deaths of 39 people at Juventus’s European Cup final victory over Liverpool dominated both the front page and the back. He was the only London-based correspondent in Bogota, Colombia, when Bobby Moore was arrested in 1970, eventually filing his copy via hotel telex at 6am.

As such, it pained him profoundly that he missed the scoop on the darkest Olympic tragedy. In Munich in 1972, he was the first journalist to learn that the attempt to rescue nine Israeli team members taken hostage had been a calamity, with all killed by Palestinian militant group Black September. But when he called his news desk, the night editor complained that he had no quote to support the story, choosing instead to lead the morning edition with the headline “Hostages Saved”.

For some, such ignominy could have proved career-ending. Except Miller was resourceful, with his contacts book rendering him a veritable almanack for the journalists who followed him. He saw Stanley Matthews play, later writing his biography and listing his personal correspondence with the “wizard of dribble” among his most treasured possessions. He was exceptionally close to Sebastian Coe, to the point where he would tighten his race shoes and prepare many of his speeches. And he was so attached to the International Olympic Committee that he became a key confidant of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the governing body’s president for 21 years. It was a relationship that grew complicated when Samaranch was accused in the late Nineties of turning a blind eye to IOC corruption, with Miller’s book about the Spaniard reviewed in some quarters as being too sympathetic.

Still, his kudos within the Olympic movement survived undimmed. In 2023, Miller was the first British journalist to receive the Pierre de Coubertin award, with then president Thomas Bach declaring that his writing “ultimately served a higher purpose than simply informing people about the latest scores and results”. I am not sure whether he ever truly retired in the conventional sense. In recent years, he would call me occasionally from his home in north Norfolk, either with an encouraging word about a column or a passionate lament about football losing its soul. He cherished a feeling, even far removed from the daily grind, of staying connected. It was an attitude that cemented him among the supreme sports chroniclers of his time.