Finding the superhuman in the super normal
#9: Scrabble champions, Augusta loopers, plucky wrestlers, troubled moonwalkers, shinty hard knocks, and awkward scribes at the Oscars...
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Tales from the fringes of sport and society…
Imagine a world where cheating doesn’t exist. Not because nobody engages in it. Because everybody does.
Copying your classmate’s answers in an exam? Fine. Card counting at the casino? No problem. Securing that new job by lying in the interview? Well played. You’ve shown courage, aptitude, and initiative. In a world where cheating is not a concept, transgressions aren’t punished. Nor even recognised. They’re rewarded as an example of ruthless human endeavour.
This is the world that Aron D'Souza seemingly wants us to live in as he launches his controversial Enhanced Games in a bid to reach the top by any means necessary.
Scheduled for a 2025 launch and backed by millions in private investment, the controversial event will allow competitors to use performance-enhancing drugs in a bid to blitz existing world records in athletics, weightlifting, and swimming.
The self-proclaimed Olympics of the future was described as "bollocks" by World Athletics president Seb Coe, who threatened a ban on anyone taking part. So far, retired Aussie swimmer James Magnussen is the only high-profile athlete to commit, though D'Souza insists that many more will follow after the Olympics this summer.
"On a fundamental, philosophical level we have the ability to overcome the weakness of our feeble biological forms and become something more," he told the BBC recently.
D'Souza's iffy reasoning positions sport’s anti-doping policy as a shackle on human advancement. He glosses over the fact that preventing unfair advantages wasn’t even the primary reason that the IOC introduced a ban on performance-boosting substances in 1967.
Danish cyclist Knud Enemark Jensen, his body pumped full of amphetamines, lost consciousness midway through the team time trial at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and fell from his bike. The skull fracture killed him.
Seven years later, British cyclist Tommy Simpson collapsed and died from heart failure a kilometre from the summit of Mont Ventoux on stage 13 of the Tour de France. He was found to have empty tubes of amphetamines in the back pocket of his jersey.
Public outcry forced the authorities into action. Most people realise that sport is not worth dying for. Athletes can forget this. Sporting bodies mustn’t.
D’Souza’s dangerous human circus also ignores recent history. In 2023 alone, Faith Kipyegon broke the world record in the 1,500m and 5,000m. At 23.56m, Ryan Crouser launched a shot put further than any human before him. Maria Perez took half a minute off the 35km race walk record. In swimming, nine new records were set at the World Championships in Japan. And Mondo Duplantis once again leaped over the world record in pole vaulting, the seventh time he's done so. He's only 23.
Last month saw the latest edition of the Barkley Marathons. Not only is it the quirkiest race on the ultrarunning calendar, it's arguably the toughest. Participants must complete five 20-mile loops within 60 hours. The off-trail route is unmarked, undulating, and unforgiving. Runners must memorise the way, and prove they've done so by tearing a page out of books scattered along the course. Before 2024, only 17 runners had completed it in 37 years. This year saw a record five runners touch the finishing gate in time, including its first-ever female finisher.
It’s not Jasmin Paris’ first running accolade. In 2019, she became the first woman to win the 268-mile Montane Spine Race, breaking the course record by 12 hours. We can be confident she did so without the help of performance-enhancing drugs, because she also stopped along the route to express milk for her newborn baby.
Paris is a 40-year-old mother of two from Manchester who works as a vet. She’s not a human lab rat, but a normal person who just so happens to be able to run longer and faster than most men half her age. She doesn’t need dope to break records, shatter expectations, and inspire awe.
Clean athletes like Paris are already walking, swimming, running, jumping, and throwing further and faster than ever before. The limits of human possibility continue to be redefined. And all done in a manner that doesn't threaten to rob families of their mothers, brothers, sisters, and husbands. These “feeble biological forms” are managing just fine without the input of Aron D’Souza.
This month’s Off-Field celebrates the superhuman in the super normal, from Scrabble champions and plucky wrestlers, to troubled moonwalkers and awkward scribes at the Oscars.
Enjoy the selection, and do consider sharing it with a friend.
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A floral tribute in Faro
Over Easter, the cobbled town of Sao Bras in Portugal’s Algarve enjoyed its annual Festa das Tochas Floridas (Festival of Flower Torches). As is often the case in small corners of the world where quirky celebrations like this occur, this involves peculiar traditions, madcap history, and plenty of booze. For first-time visitors, it’s a step into the surreal. To locals, it’s perfectly normal behaviour for this time of year.
Some time ago, nearly a decade in fact, I had the pleasure of visiting the town and writing about the festival for an inflight magazine. Not only has the airline (Monarch) since gone bust, but a pandemic pendulum swing towards sitting on arses at home means that cushy gigs like this one are few and far between for this humble writer, so you’ll forgive me for harking back to the good old days when I could live out my Hunter S Thompson fantasies.
Although, given that this story involves me making a fool of myself on foreign soil - just like Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh did in the region 400 years before me - I should probably be thankful I ever got the commission in the first place.
The Onefourseven Snooker Podcast
You might recall that the Unsung podcast was shortlisted as a finalist in the 2024 Sports Podcast Awards earlier this year. The nod was as welcome as it was unexpected, given that the ten episodes of series one represented our first stab in the world of podcasting.
With series two in the works and aiming for a Spring/Summer release, I thought it only right to link out to the podcast crowned the winner in the Sports Talk category. Given some of the established names in the same field - including Ian Wright, Colin Cowherd, and Super Bowl winner Shannon Sharpe - the fact the title went to a fellow indie podcast deserves particular praise.
Congratulations go to Phil Seymour and Shaun Murphy of The Onefourseven Snooker Podcast. With the World Championship beginning later this month in the hallowed surroundings of Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, there’s no better time to tune in.
Masters of the green: the black caddies of Augusta National
Rejoice! It's Masters week. The stunning Augusta National course is renowned for its blooming azaleas, haughty pomp, and one of the slickest brands in sport. It's also one of the few sporting events where the official app adds real value to the coverage: download it and thank me later.
But, this being golf, there are elements of the competition's history that are uncomfortable, to say the least. Like the original segregation rule that dictated that all golfers be white and all caddies be black. This excellent longread from Latria Graham for Garden & Gun provides some overdue recognition for Augusta's legendary loopers and addresses the complex issues that emerged when the ban on outside caddies ended in 1982.
“Black faces on the greens, too, have all but disappeared. “We only have two Black people on the PGA Tour right now,” Dent points out. “When I was out on tour, we had fourteen at one time.” That’s the irony of the Masters’ all-Black-caddie rule: It was archaic and steeped in racism. And it also, the men admit, granted them entry to a gilded world where they had a chance to learn the game.”
Why Jasmin Paris becoming the first female to ever finish the Barkley Marathon needs to be on your radar
I've mentioned Jasmin Paris' amazing Barkley Marathons success in the intro, but this Marie Claire article goes into the data to demonstrate exactly why her achievement was so special. Writer Ally Head suggests that, while the research is appallingly low, there is growing evidence that female psychological power can beat male strength over endurance distances.
“Over most distances, like 5kms, 10kms, half marathons and marathons, there's a ten to twelve per cent difference in finishing times between the genders. At the ultramarathon level, it lowers to four to eight per cent, building a case for the theory that women are built to run longer distances.”
From ted to pernoctated, Scrabble’s best player knows no limits
Nigel Richards is one of the most mind-bogglingly talented players ever to exist. In anything ever. He just so happens to play competitive Scrabble, but resist any temptation to belittle his area of expertise before reading this excellent profile by Stefan Fatsis for Defector.
Richards isn't simply a multiple world champion, he's believed to have memorised the entire English Scrabble lexicon of over 280,000 words. He also won the French World Championship despite not speaking French. Meanwhile, when I played my wife at Scrabble last week, my highest-scoring word was "then”. Sakes.
The original Gunnersaurus: ‘All I wanted was for somebody to say I’d done a good job’
When I was writing Unsung, the original outline included a chapter on football mascots. I enjoyed fun chats with the likes of Wolfie (Wolves), Pottermus (Stoke City) and Yorkie the Lion (York City), who were brimming with outlandish stories from ‘90s football. I also spoke to a costume maker, who delved into the quirks of transforming an adult into a furry animal that makes kids smile in football stadia. Quite odd when you put it like that, isn't it?
Anyway, the chapter never made it to print, a victim of making the book less football-heavy, but I hope to return to the stories of Wolfie and co. one day. In the meantime, this feature from The Athletic on Jerry Quy - aka Arsenal’s Gunnersaurus Rex - is an illuminating read on his 26 years as a giant green dinosaur.
I was the only girl on my school’s wrestling team
This The Cut feature by Crystal Hana Kim isn’t simply a fantastic story of grit and determination on the mat, but also an insight into how sport can provide direction in other walks of life. As a girl grappling with boys, by going against the norm in wrestling Kim found it easier to do so in her writing, too. As well as being an inspirational feminist tale, there's something to take from it for male allies in the form of her coach's subtle encouragement and her teammates' eventual support.
An ancient sport in the modern world
You're unlikely to have heard of Norman ‘Brick’ McArthur, but he has amateur sport coursing through his veins, making him exactly the sort of character this newsletter loves to showcase.
Sam Bowles of Pitch Magazine headed to the wild and rugged Cairngorms to take in the game that means so much to McArthur and his long-time club of Newtonmore. The sport is shinty and, there's no other way to put this, it's played almost exclusively by old school hard bastards like Norman.
‘All these normal people, packed into a human lasagne’: my glamour-free night at the Oscars
The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage attended this year’s Oscars by blagging a spot in the cheap seats, which appears to be the film industry equivalent of sitting in row ZZ of Barcelona’s Nou Camp. His write-up of the night as a “normal person” is, as one comes to expect from Heritage, very funny.
“On the lower floor, the A-listers have to be prim and attentive at all times in case they annoy someone who could end their career. The mezzanine people have no such concerns. This extends to the servers. One of them was walking around with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. I asked her what they were and she just shrugged politely. Doesn’t matter, her smile implied. They are free and you are normal; you are going to eat it. And I did. That woman could see into my very soul.”
Moondust: in search of the men who fell to Earth, Andrew Smith
“From the Moon, he said, the planet was like a jewel, so colourful and bright that you felt you could reach up and grab it, hold it in your hands and marvel at it like the precious thing it is. Then he described his horror at realizing that his life could only be one long, slow anticlimax from there. All that effort and creativity … what had it been for? The development of Teflon? A few photographs? By 1972, Americans didn’t give a damn about space.”
July will see the 55th anniversary of the first human steps on the moon and, if all goes to plan with NASA’s Artemis programme, 2026 should see mankind again take a giant leap towards Earth’s rocky outpost.
Of the 12 men who've walked on the moon only four are still alive today. Given that the youngest of those four, Harrison ‘Jack’ Schmitt, is 88 years old, there's a good chance that by the time humankind repeats its most impressive feat, there'll be no living members from those historic Apollo missions.
It’s what makes Andrew Smith’s Moondust such an important piece of work, as well as a fascinating, witty, and wonderfully written one, as he tracks down the last remaining moonwalkers (nine were still with us when he wrote this in 2005) to document their memories and fates.
After experiencing a celestial and life-defining moment that only 11 others in history share, how does one return to normality on Earth? The answer is not very well at all, as these titans of the space race struggled to realign with their comparative insignificance after slipping the surly bonds of Earth.
When Neil Armstrong stood on the moon’s surface he closed one eye and blotted out the Earth with his thumb. He was asked if he felt like a giant. Quite the contrary, he answered, "I felt, very, very small."
Thanks for reading April’s edition of Off-Field. If you enjoyed the read, why not share it with a friend who might enjoy it too. The newsletter is, and always will be, free.
If you’d like to recommend anything for a future edition, give me a shout via alexisnjames@gmail.com. See you next month, fellow feeble biological form…