For some, decline and fall is gradual. politicians and rock stars, for instance, can often exit quietly from their struts upon life's stage, which--and Macbeth was surely referring to these two trades--are often "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." But if you are Carl Lewis or Mark Spitz, Merlene Ottey or Sergei Bubka, the end takes only seconds. All the world is watching, and no political analyst or music critic carves turkey like a sports fan.

The pressure in sport has become so great that when winners with contorted faces repeatedly punch the air as they cross the line, their blows are really aimed at the 5 billion or so double chins of the world's couch potatoes, those people who know all the statistics but lack the vital ones necessary to get out there and just do it.

Last week's hundimiento, or sinking, as the Spanish papers called it, of cyclist Miguel Indurain in the Tour de France was salutary to watch. It happened on his 32nd birthday, his beginning and his end attached in a way that would have tickled T.S. Eliot. Indurain is accustomed to happy birthdays, because when July 16 comes round each year he is dripping sweat, sucking wind and roughly two-thirds of the way through winning the toughest race on two wheels.

That's how the Spaniard celebrated his cumpleanos in 1991, '92, '93, '94 and '95. Three other riders have won five Tours (Anquetil, Merckx and Hinault), but not consecutively. So 1996 was to make Indurain indisputably the best ever, bigger than Cyclops: six on the trot, a total of more than 500 hours in the saddle, some 25,000 km of heat and snow, against the clock, and the best legs and lungs in the world. Always first.

Last Wednesday, Indurain pedaled into his native Pamplona with a gap of more than 15 minutes between himself and Bjarne Riis from Denmark. With only four days still to go, a 15-min. Tour lead is like giving Michael Johnson a 10-m start in the 200.

Johnson's 200-m rivals have the advantage that their not winning lasts somewhere between 19 and 20 seconds. For Indurain, the Tour would drag out another 20 hours or so. But the man other cyclists call "the Machine," and whom one tabloid clumsily dubbed "Indurainator," held high the hand of leader Riis in acknowledgement that a new hero had risen. He laughed and threw a sponsor's flowers into the crowd, then gave interviews with the same courtesy and candor as ever. He had given his all, "but the others were better than me."

Nothing so became the man as his losing. In the week the Olympic Games started, and in a world where the fear of not winning leads athletes to take steroids, footballers to abuse referees, tennis players to yell at line calls, and fans to bay for blood from the stands or go on rampages if "their" team loses, his grace in defeat was exemplary.

Indurain is not the last good sport. Triple-jump world-record holder Jonathan Edwards is an equally humble champion, and there are others. Today many of the world's athletic elite are only too ready to give their maker the credit for their medals--although, with some, one suspects the beseeching goes along these lines: Dear God, let me be first. Let someone be standing near the finish line to plant a national flag in my hand. Let me run a lap of glory. And above all, let the marketing manager of Costabundle sports shoes be watching. Amen.

A particularly obnoxious ad on Spanish television repeated throughout this Tour de France that "we" were thirsting for another victory, as though "we" were also riding the 3,835-km course that ended at the Arc de Triomphe on Sunday. And "we" are already planning Indurain's and "our" victory next year. Immediately after Miguel admitted that the force wasn't with him this time, commentators began talking about the magic sixth in '97.

But expectation is the mother of bad sports. Huge endorsement contracts, jingoistic journalists and unforgiving fans are as much to blame as individual ambition. Athletes still talk respectfully about personal bests, which really are all a human can be asked to try for. But when did you last hear someone interviewed for achieving his or her best, and coming in fifth? As Queen Victoria insisted, "We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat."

The man from Pamplona has by now resumed his unostentatious life with his wife Marisa and their baby son Miguel. Like a marathon runner's, his body will slowly recover from the tremendous stresses imposed by the Tour. He told the Spanish newspaper El Pais before the competition began that he does not read newspapers often, and never what they write about him. He is confident enough to say, "I am what I am." Indurain probably doesn't read Shakespeare either, but last week he proved another of Macbeth's lines: "There's nothing serious in mortality." And disproved what the fallen king went on to argue, which was that "renown and grace is dead."