Not perhaps with the insatiable surge of his real pomp, but with a kick of the turbo thirty metres out, nudging out in front and taking it by a margin of 0.08 seconds.
Things should be getting more exciting any minute now, though there was no real pomp and circumstance on primary night last week in the Radisson ballroom where he declared, after winning in Pennsylvania, New York and three other states, "A better America begins tonight".
For Manchester United and then Real Madrid the in-pomp Ronaldo was never passive.
Sigge is caught up in the drama of public events, from a violent longshoreman's strike to the First World War, an adventure that turns out to be more a matter of pomp and revelry than of real danger or glory.
In a strange quirk of a sport which has been going for the best part of a century and a half, there is only one unbeaten international run with any real historical or emotional heft: the 30-game pomp of the golden Hungarian team of the early 1950s.
Why is the G20 obviously better than broader talks or bilateral discussions (which, lacking the pomp and spotlight of summity, might make real discussion and compromise easier)?
We really have to go back to Edward Elgar for the real thing - a talent so considerable that attempts at Pomp and Circumstance have endured as popular concert hall repertoire.
There's a kind of pomp about such shows: if you visit them in real life, they are heavily populated by producers, experts, speakers.
Hollywood still loves the pomp and luster of the office, but the presidency, real and imaginary, seems more at home on television, where the inhabitants of the office are ritually subjected to late-night ridicule and Sunday morning dissection.
Savage, whose real name was Randy Poffo, would strut into the ring to his theme song "Pomp and Circumstance," muscles gleaming and neon spandex shining, growling his signature expression, "Oooh, yeah!" before diving at his opponents, elbows first.
It's strange, because aside from its inexhaustible capacity to cause traffic jams around Buckingham Palace for another pomp-laden Trooping the Color, the British monarchy wields no real power.
