And he feels, having watched how Pascal exposed Froch's lack of defence, that he will have too much speed and too much ring-craft for the Brit.

BBC: The secret diary of Carl Froch

In full gaucho regalia, horsemen stand on their saddles and ride at full speed to spear a tiny ring dangling from a ribbon.

BBC: Where have all the cowboys gone?

But the next implication is that tighter integration of the eurozone countries would put Britain more clearly on the outer ring of a two-speed Europe - less integrated and showing every sign of wanting to stay there.

BBC: Britain pushes hard choices for Europe's hard core

The ring roads that roar around Mexico's big cities have speed limits of up to 80kph.

ECONOMIST: How half of Mexico ended up without driving tests

The calm will now be shattered, they fear, by the construction of a ring road intended to draw traffic away from the chaotic city and speed goods to and from Santos, Brazil's biggest port.

ECONOMIST: Ancestral claims and modern interests

The discovery eventually came about using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a machine at CERN that sends bunches of protons round a ring 27km in circumference, in opposite directions, at close to the speed of light, so that they collide head on.

ECONOMIST: The Higgs boson