Alternative Sports Star Fantasy XV

Being as I am a massive rugby nerd, one of the pages I follow on Facebook goes by the name of ‘Rugby Banter Page’. In the last few months, they have also set up a website, on which they recently posted this rugby fantasy XV made up of stars of other sports. And Dan Carter. Sitting with a couple of mates watching the Leicester-Worcester match the other day, this team came up in conversation and all thought that, although good, there was enough potential in the world of sport to rival even this star-studded line-up. One thing lead to another, and in the space of a few minutes we had our own, rival squad ready to face down the opposition. And then I thought ‘hey, I have a blog, so I might as well share’.*

Front Row: 1. Wanderlei Silva, 2. Chad le Clos, 3. Magnus ver Magnusson
In the props, we’ve gone big and nasty. Silva is a record-holding Brazilian MMA fighter, and although some might claim what he does isn’t really sport, I would invite them to say so to his face after hearing of his nickname ‘the Axe Murderer’ and watching this. Despite this wanton aggression, he is known as being a consummate sportsman once a fight is over, so should fit into rugby’s post-match drinking culture perfectly. Together with four time world’s strongest man Magnussen (who, whilst retired and without quite the pedigree of RBP’s chosen strongman Mariusz Pudzianowski, gets a place in the team by virtue of his name alone), they form possibly the hardest and most imposing front row unit imagineable. In between them is South African swimmer le Clos, included for two reasons beyond the natural rugby-playing ability imbued in every native South African. Firstly, being a double Olympic gold medal winner in butterfly is sure to give him ‘overarm throw muscles’ capable of throwing a lineout ball to the far side of the pitch, and secondly his dad will give someone entertaining for the TV people to interview.

Second Row: 4. Nikolai Valuev, 5. LeBron James
We felt that RBP’s second row combo of heavyweight boxer as enforcer with overly-tall basketballer for lineout time was a good one, but personally reckon that better candidates are available than their chosen pair if we consider rugby-applicable skill. In place of Wladimir Klitschko we have former heavyweight champion Valuev; whilst not as successful a boxer as Klitschko, Valuev played basketball and water polo as a child which should give him good handling ability, and at seven foot tall he offers a serious lineout option as well (even if lifting him could prove a challenge even for Magnussen). To combat the sheer height of Tao Ming in the lineout, we’ve gone for the shorter but infinitely more skilful LeBron James- frequently considered the best basketballer in the world, what he lacks (relatively speaking) in height he will more than make up for in agility.

Back row: 6. Ian Bell, 7. Lewis Smith, 8. Ashton Eaton
With RBP selecting big hitter Gayle at 6, we thought Bell would be a perfect, utterly fearless opposite number as a player who, when fielding, is frequently asked to get solid lumps of wood and leather smashed at his head from three metres away- and then catch the thing. Not to mention the fact that he likes to give the ball a smash now and again too. At openside, gymnast Smith has, we feel, potential to become a real star; with superb upper body strength and posture, long arms for rangy tackling and a cheeky bit of cheating at ruck time, and all the agility needed to challenge in the air as a third lineout option or ball-stealer, he might even be able to show off some fancy footwork after winning last year’s series of Strictly Come Dancing. Finally, Ashton Eaton is the world decathlon record holder and current Olympic champion, with incredible speed, strength, power and all-round skill that belies his slight physique and gives him all the skill-set and more for an attacking, combative No.8. He’s called ‘the world’s greatest athlete’ for a reason.

Half Backs: 9. Ronnie O’Sullivan, 10. Andres Iniesta
Whilst O’Sullivan’s mouth has frequently got him into trouble in snooker circles, being gobby is a prerequisite for every good scrum-half, and when you throw in his hand-eye coordination, characteristic flair and speed of thought (he still holds the record for the world’s fastest 147 break) we have a seriously promising half-back on our hands. Since RBP already bagsied Lionel Messi, we went for his Barcelona team-mate and World Cup winner Iniesta at fly-half. With superlative kicking ability, attacking flair and not inconsiderable turn of pace, the man voted UEFA player of the season last year should be a natural fit at 10.

Centres: 12. Ramy Ashour, 13. Johan Blake
Few of you may have heard of Ramy Ashour; neither had I until my brother introduced me to him. The Egyptian is currently world squash champion and current holder of just about any major squash title you care to mention, and if his being a champion of one of the most technically difficult of all sports didn’t already alert you to his superb reactions, dexterity and speed over a short distance and dexterity then this might, not to mention revealing his near-supernatural levels of all-around perception and the sheer deftness of his hand motion. In all, his skill would form the perfect foil to sprinter Blake’s sheer speed and power, which would make more than a few defenders wonder if another Tuilagi brother had been let in.

Back Three: 11. Lawrence Okoye, 14. Sam Tomkins, 15. Jonty Rhodes
Some would argue that choosing Okoye is cheating a bit; although the former Olympic discus thrower now plays American Football in the NFL, he played on the wing (yes really, wing) for Whitgift, the noted rugby school. Still, he’s not technically a rugby player now, so I think he counts- plus, he would put the fear of God into any opposition winger. At fullback we have another cricketer and another retiree; Rhodes was a South African international until 2003, who gets in our team for having the safest pair of hands in the world. Don’t believe me? Watch this.
Finally, on the right wing, comes our permitted one actual rugby player, although rather than fishing in my preferred code of union (George North was a serious consideration) I chose instead to go for league player (for the moment at least) Tomkins. I could justify his selection by talking about his creativity, versatility (he would be able to slot in at either half back position should the need arise) or sheer pace, but one statistic does all the talking for me: 149 games for Wigan, 144 tries. End of discussion

*Our rules: All contestants must be male (despite some argument, we eventually agreed to maintain rugby’s single-sex rules), none may have been picked by the Rugby Banter Page’s team, retired players are acceptable, one should attempt to choose from as wide a variety of sports as possible and the resulting team must on no account be taken seriously.

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What good are Olympians?

In my last post I talked about the Euro 2012 football tournament, an event that no European could hope to ignore unless they lived in a particularly well-soundproofed cave. The event I’m going to talk about today however, has a strange power akin to osmosis meaning that it is physically impossible to avoid hearing about it from any distance less than 50 miles from any living being or, if you live in Britain, the centre of the earth. It is, of course, the London 2012 Olympics.

Olympians are, of course, the pinnacle of human physical perfection- or so we keep on being told, despite Usain Bolt’s famous obsession with chicken nuggets. In fact, it can be hard, on occasion, to believe just how amazing Olympians are meant to be. This is especially true given the amount of media attention they have attracted in recent times presenting them as ‘just normal people’, involving talks with their families and discussions of their home lives and ‘normalness’.

To an extent, some of their achievements don’t seem to be super-amazing either, when you think about it. Usain Bolt is a prime example- the man is the fastest on earth and is able to cover 100 metres in a little under 10 seconds.  This, we are told, is amazingly exceptional- despite the fact that anyone watching athletics willquickly notice a far larger number of people all able to run the same distance in less than a second more time. Then there are the dozens of other amateur or schoolboy sprinters, and fast sportsmen such as rugby wingers, who are able to do their 100 in around 11 seconds- in fact one England Sevens player (Dan Norton) has been clocked as quicker than Bolt over 20 minutes, and as a sportsman rather than athlete probably has a broader range of physical skills than him. Admittedly, most of us are probably not going to come close to any of that- but the fastest guy any given person knows is likely to be able to cover 100m in around 12 seconds, despite probably having no formal sprint training and not dedicating their lives to running very quickly in a straight line for an incredibly short period of time, which is perhaps not the most versatile of life skills.

A similar idea can be applied to quite a range of Olympic fields. Most people who keep themselves fit and lead an at least reasonably active lifestyle could cover 400m in around a minute with a little practice, so perhaps covering it in 45 seconds is not something super-amazing. I am not an especially serious rower, but I use a machine occasionally and can clock a time over 2000m of around 7:30- just a minute slower than the men’s world record on-water time for single sculls, and only 2 minutes slower than the record for a machine. A lot of blokes in the pub would consider themselves enough of a dab hand in a fight to be an at least reasonable boxer with a bit of training, and amateur boxers can’t be all that amazing can they? And have you seen the bows they use for archery? They make a laser sniper rifle look like a nerf gun- anyone could hit a target with one of those, surely?

And that’s before you even consider the practical implications of what it means to be an Olympian- I’ll use handball as an example. Up until winning the bid for the 2012 games, Britain had never had a handball team, and after the people who run these things had insisted that Team GB would enter a competitor in every event they had to produce an acceptable outfit within 4 years. This meant recruiting from people who’d already played high level sport (which mainly ended up being rugby players and basketballers) and retraining them as handballers. This required them all to spend countless weeks at special training camps. Most of them had to give up their jobs and entire lives for a worse-paid job with poorer facilities, all in pursuit of their one shot at the Olympics. As far as I know, they have yet to win a game. Surely a balanced life, sampling all there is of the human experience, makes one a better person than this relentlessly single-minded devotion?

Well… maybe, but to sell the achievements of an Olympian short is to seriously devalue them. True, in some events the differences between amateur and world-leading may not be huge, but in others the difference can be truly staggering. Consider distance running- I consider myself to be a reasonably fit guy, and go running of occasion around a 4-mile (6.4 km) course near where I live. There’s the odd small hill, but the majority of it is flat. I can cover that course in about half an hour, by the end of which I am usually sweating like a paedo in a nursery (my apologies for the rather crude expression). However, the other day a news item I saw featured a 10km event in which a few soon to be Olympians were taking part. Bear in mind that this course was over half as long again as mine… and yet they covered it in three minutes less time than I could my course. And they barely looked tired. Worse still, at my rate of running it would take me around three and a quarter hours (assuming I could somehow replicate my pace for six and a half times the distance) to complete a marathon, whereas even a mediocre Olympic marathon runner would expect to hit just two. Usain Bolt can typically keep a top speed of around 12 metres per second up for around 4 or 5 seconds, whilst a marathon runner can keep up six for hours on end. Consider events such as the javelin- they might look all light and easy to throw, but from experience trust me, they’re not. I can get one perhaps 15 metres- an Olympian six times that distance. In a long jump, most of us would struggle to exceed a metre or two, whereas the poorest Olympian jumper can hit six or seven with ease.

In these events the gulf in ability between an Olympian and a mere mortal is obvious- but do not be mistaken. That difference in terms of sheer class is present in every single Olympic discipline, and every athlete attending the games in London this year represents a world leader in their field. The Olympics is a showcase of the top 0.01% of the human race, and just how amazing we can be- and they deserve every ounce of admiration and respect that they get.