There's no such thing as master of none
#14: Subbuteo champions, toe wrestling icons, stone skimming masters, and a welcome win for the world's worst football team...
Tales from the fringes of sport and society…
Extinguished but seared into memory, the Olympic flame was still smouldering in Paris when YovGov published a survey that revealed something remarkable about the British psyche. It turns out that 27% of us believe we would qualify for the 2028 LA Games if given four years to train for it.
Air rifle was the sport most of us reckoned we could reach Olympic standard in, no doubt influenced by the summer’s iconic image of Turkish shooter Yusuf Dikec, giving off casual dad vibes with his reading specs and hand in his pocket. If the middle-aged bloke who looks like he's taking potshots at the rats raiding his bins can win a medal, surely we can too? It's an understandable, if misguided, rationale.
But what about the 6% who said they could qualify for the 100m? Who in their right minds watched eight human cannonballs finish in under 10 seconds and thought, "Yeah, I might just manage that."
Maybe every Olympic event should include a civilian entrant, plucked randomly from the electoral register as a jury service-style duty to compete against the elite. It might give those watching at home a better idea of the levels we’re witnessing.
“Noah Lyles is the Olympic 100m champion in 9.79 seconds. Crossing the line last, in 3 minutes and 20 seconds, is the Parisian plumber who received an unexpected call-up this morning. Can we get a medic for Jacques, please?"
It would be easy to come to two quick conclusions here. The British don’t play enough sport, nor watch enough of it live to appreciate that these athletes exist in a different realm to the rest of us. But maybe that’s too reductive and cynical. After all, it was the 18-24-year-olds who answered the poll most positively (39% of the self-confident buggers), and who am I to judge the hutzpah of youth.
When I was 24 and enjoying my first job in media, I shared an idea with my boss that would see me train with the San Marino football team, to gauge the standard of the lowest-ranked team in international football. My editor, a 40-something author of several sports books, laughed. Not because he wanted to discourage me, but because he’d had the same cocky thought when he was that age. Unsurprisingly, the San Marino Football Federation didn’t respond to my request, just as they’d ignored his over a decade earlier.
Sixteen years later, I cringe at the idea and wouldn’t dream of pitching something so conceited today. Especially given the much-maligned Sammarinese - having lost 196 of the 205 matches in their history - recorded their first-ever competitive win just weeks ago with a historic 1-0 victory over Liechtenstein, the goal scored by 19-year-old Nicko Sensoli. A lad half my age.
Turning 40 myself this month brought with it the thudding realisation that my physical peak was long behind me. For those who enjoy Parkrun every Saturday morning, it turns out this is the age we’re categorised as a “veteran”. Yeesh. Time to stop daydreaming about becoming an international sporting great, I suppose.
Or…
…I embrace the delusions of the 27% club and rediscover the positive mindset of my 24-year-old self. Sure, international football might be a stretch, and the Olympics too. But in the month where we’ve seen champions crowned in Subbuteo, stone skimming, and toe wrestling, perhaps the secret to becoming a sporting great is not to hone your body for sport, but to find the right sport for your body.
And, if Indian athlete Vallabhajosyula Sriramulu is anything to go by, maybe I still have time to figure out what that is. He won three gold medals at the World Masters Athletics Championships in Gothenburg this month, in javelin, discus, and shot put. He’s 101 years old.
Enjoy this month’s selection, which - incase you don’t believe they exist - includes stories on all the events referenced above.
The business of losing
In August last year, BBC Sport published my longread about the Washington Generals, the long-suffering rivals to the Harlem Globetrotters. I interviewed a handful of Generals’ players to find out why they dared to turn out for that rarest of sporting commodities: the underdogs you're not supposed to root for.
The article was well received and among the feedback was an email from the grandson of Harlem Globetrotters’ founder Abe Saperstein, who got in touch to say how much he’d enjoyed the read. A year on, and I’m thrilled to say the article has been adapted into a podcast for the BBC World Service.
The Business of Losing, part of the Amazing Sport Stories series, is presented and produced by Joel Hammer. Listen to it on BBC Sounds or hit the button below.
How San Marino, world's worst team, got first win in 20 years
San Marino secured only the second win in their history this month, their first ever in a competitive tournament. Such is the nation’s renown in football that the story was covered in many places, but this write-up by Paul Watson should be considered the definitive text.
Not only is Watson an expert when it comes to international football’s niche outposts - his brilliant 2013 book Up Pohnpei documented his unlikely quest coaching the tiny Pacific Island nation and his podcast The Sweeper covers FIFA’s lesser-known members - but the journalist was actually there at the Stadio Olimpico in Serravalle to witness the historic win, meaning he was able to provide beautiful nuggets like this:
"I'm an old man," said Alessandro, a staunch San Marino fan. "I always say that you can see anything happen if you watch enough football. But I have to say I thought I might never see this."
On the other end of the age scale, two mothers were nursing babies who can now boast a 100% winning record in their lives as San Marino fans. The state provides all newborns with a national team jersey in a bid to encourage children to take up the task of supporting one of the world's least successful sides.
Scotland's offbeat world championship of stone skimming
Every September, the Hebridean island of Easdale hosts a contest that welcomes challengers from five continents and 27 countries. Previous champions have come from Hungary, Japan, and New Zealand.
One contestant practices 160 times a week, while another goes through flexibility conditioning to ensure no injuries on the day. It is, of course, the World Stone Skimming Championships, and this by Mike MacEacheran is an entertaining write-up of a truly unique event.
The mood was electric, like a rock concert, with the gathered crowd heckling support. But McGeachy was not listening, nor preparing to tee-off, mountain bike or take part in any other everyday sport. She was about to skim a stone, feeling its cold hard edges on her fingertips, clinging to it with competitive seriousness.
Seconds later, following a waist-high baseball-style pitch, the flat-bottomed slate pebble spun 42m across the waterlogged quarry in front of her, hovering and zinging through the air as if a drunken dragonfly. It twirled into the air 15 times. In her own words, it was an "absolute belter".
UK town catches Subbuteo fever
In my increasingly foggy mind, I used to play Subbuteo a lot as a kid. I had around a dozen teams, a dutifully ironed green pitch, and that fabulous retro scoreboard with every team name imaginable carefully cut out from those black sheets of paper. But if I dig out specific memories, they're all a bit bleak.
I remember that beautiful scoreboard melting when I accidentally left it too close to our living room fireplace, warping the structure so badly it looked like something left behind in Chernobyl. There's the time I clumsily crushed a red and white player with my elbow, meaning any time I wanted to play as my beloved Sunderland I'd automatically start a man down. And then there's my dad offering any excuse imaginable not to play what he found a dull pursuit. "Would you not rather kick a real ball outside instead?". In fairness, he had a point. But he probably regretted this advice when I came back inside to tell him I'd accidentally lumped that real ball through his real shed window.
Anyway, it turns out some continued where the rest of us gave up, and those legends celebrated the Subbuteo World Cup in Tunbridge Wells last week.
I’m the toe wrestling world champion – my family couldn’t be prouder of me
No bad thing has ever come from an event devised in a pub, and 50 years on from its first edition in 1974, Derbyshire's World Toe Wrestling Championship is further proof of this. Held in Ashbourne Marketplace and streamed live on YouTube from the Haig Bar, the competition features such titans as Ben “Toe-tal Destruction” Woodroffe and Alan "Nasty" Nash. In this piece for Metro, Lisa "Twinkletoes" Shenton, the seven-time female champion, provides a first-person account of how she enjoys a foothold in the competition.
Toe wrestling is like arm wrestling, but with your feet. The battle takes place on a specially built ‘toedium’, that has two walls on either side. You lock your toes in there, and it’s the best of three starting with your right foot. You need to touch the wall with your foot or toe.
The strange sport of pedestrianism got Victorians hooked on coca
This intriguing article from Kyle Hoekstra for History Hit concerns the unusual sport of pedestrianism, and more specifically how a celebrity long-distance walker from the USA - the brilliantly-named Edward Payson Weston - might have played a part in the rise of cocaine use in Victorian Britain.
World Nomad Games: The spectacular 'Olympics' of Central Asia
While millions of us lamented the end of a gripping Olympic and Paralympic summer, for those in Central Asia the multi-sport joy continues with the World Nomad Games. Launched by Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambayev in 2014 as a way to preserve the region's nomadic traditions, the Games have been held every two years since and feature events including archery, hunting with eagles, and horseback wrestling. This BBC Travel story from Ben Mayhew covers the recent 2024 event held in Kazakhstan's capital of Astana.
No pie, no priest: A journey through the folk sports of Britain, Harry Pearson
“Back then, you see, it was a novelty for a pub to close down. My dad's best mate at British Steel, Big Roy Gowling, had made a small fortune from investments. 'He only puts his money in two things - public houses and undertakers,' my father would say admiringly of his friend's financial cunning, ‘He says there are only two things you can be certain of: men will always drink beer and they will always die.’”
Harry Pearson is Britain's Bill Bryson, capable of infusing the seemingly mundane and ordinary with a curiosity for its history and an intrigue about its future. And, ever since his wonderful debut book twenty years ago, covering north east football in The Far Corner, he does it all with a warmth and humour that makes you want to be there alongside him, sipping the local grog in whichever backwater village he's found himself in this time.
In No Pie, No Priest, he tours the country in search of our oldest, quirkiest, and downright maddest folk sports. From the Viking origins of Knur and Spell in West Yorkshire to Popinjay in Ayrshire, Pearson is on top form.
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“My son bought me a walker when I was 80, and for the last 20 years it’s been lying up there, untouched." - Indian athlete Vallabhajosyula Sriramulu