Tim Rolfe, the senior flying groom for Peden Bloodstock, said his job was as much about calming nervous handlers as about taking care of the horses.
Ospreys stand-off Dan Biggar, Scarlets 10 Rhys Priestland and are the senior fly-halves in the current Wales squad.
And the promotion of Handre Pollard from Under-20s starlet to senior fly-half seemed to add a little devilry to the South African attack.
Senior Tories flew stateside to help the campaigns of George Bush Sr, Bob Dole and George Bush Jr, while their Labour counterparts were often on the same planes heading to canvass for the Democrats.
They are being replaced by a team of senior executives flown out from the UK led by Adrian Brown, currently chief executive of UK and Western Europe.
Their critics like nothing more than stories of senior environmentalists flying to work or green champions crisscrossing the globe to discuss climate change (think airplane-owning UN "messenger of peace" Leonardo DiCaprio).
In September, in the midst of an austerity drive that had senior officials flying coach, he posted a message about riding in "cattle class out of solidarity with all our holy cows!" But the remark about cows, in the context of Hinduism, was not a laughing matter for many, and some officials in his own party said he should resign over the remark.
Diplomats, military officers and senior officials flying in from Washington often say privately that while public graft is pernicious, there is no point in trying to abolish it and that trying to do so could destroy the very government the West has helped to build.
Ms. Beard's book is full of meticulous, inside detail — at one point, after the dismissal of two top bankers (in what came to be known as the Monday Massacre) she recounts how Tarek anothereguid, another senior banker, flew back from vacation, arriving at the office still in an aqua T-shirt and Topsiders.
The administration's notion of diplomacy in the theatre seemed to boil down to relays of senior officials flying into Kabul to browbeat Karzai and into Islamabad to intimidate Zarkari and Kayani.
"Jonestown was actually a wonderful place," said Gerald Gouveia, 54, who as a young army pilot would fly senior Jonestown members to Port Kaituma.
