Beyond this wheelchair fencing, which reaches its climax on Saturday with the team finals, is among the most aristocratic of Paralympic events, a founding discipline among the "parallel" sports devised at his Buckinghamshire base by the great emigre German neuroscientist Ludwig Guttmann.
We spent the first part of the meal talking about sports, and I asked him whether he thought there might be a parallel between professional sports teams and charities.
"The parallel with sport is an interesting one because it's half a parallel; because in sport, yes you're in it, in the English tradition, to take part, but in reality you're in it to win," he said.
Wheelchair basketball is one of the more distinct sports here, one that stands apart from being simply a parallel discipline to an Olympic sport.
But this editor helped me to regard sports as a parallel world full of little climaxes and telling details, just waiting for you to make the most of them.
And much to the dismay of its growing community of fans, it does not look like Hoffenheim will be able to stage a comeback.Even so, the club is a football sensation by any measure and one for which it is hard to find a parallel, at least in recent sporting history.
Thus, the study modeled exposures in a parallel study of consumers of sport-caught fish in northeast Wisconsin.
I see a parallel in the steroids era of baseball and sports in general.
James Wilsdon, a British professor who has studied Chinese technological creativity, sees a parallel between China's scientific agenda and its sporting one.
