First to wear football boots? Henry VIII!
- Everything to Play For is the perfect gift for any sports-mad person you know
- READ MORE: Henry loved the thrill of the chase, not being married to a feisty wife...
SPORT
EVERYTHING TO PLAY FOR: THE QI BOOKOF SPORTS
by James Harkin & Anna Ptaszynski (Faber & Faber £14.99, 400pp)
If there was ever an inevitability, it was that someone would eventually write The QI Book Of Sports. QI has become the most reliable brand in the small but select world of trivia, and there’s nothing more trivial than sport.
You might also say that — such as, for example, the recent Saturday in which England lost twice to South Africa in different world cups — sport can often be. . . Quite Interesting.
James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski are long-serving QI elves who have written countless books and contributed to even more TV shows.
Harkin is a recovering football referee, and Ptaszynski’s greatest sporting achievement is knocking a kookaburra off its perch with a sausage.
They are as qualified as anyone could be to write this book, and they have done a wonderful job. Cock-threshing, for instance, was a game played on Shrove Tuesday, in which a rooster was tied to the ground and people threw stones at it until it fell over.
Henry VIII and was the first person we know of who owned a pair of football boots
Cock-threshing was a game played on Shrove Tuesday, in which a rooster was tied to the ground and people threw stones at it until it fell over
Henry VIII, as well as marrying half the women in England, played football, and was the first person we know of who owned a pair of football boots.
He also had two pairs of fencing shoes and 37 pairs of velvet shoes, which presumably were not sports-related.
Brett Lee, the former Australian fast bowler, now plays in a rock band called Six & Out.
If your golf ball lands next to venomous snakes, stinging bees, alligators, fire ants or bears, you can move it to a safer area without incurring a penalty shot. If it lands next to a cactus, you can’t move it, but you can wrap a towel around your body to protect you when you play your next shot.
Lance Armstrong, the drug-hoover cyclist, denied doping for many years but had to pay out millions in settlements when he was finally caught. But he is still incredibly rich, as he was an early investor in the taxi app Uber. Still taking people for a ride, then …
People have been cheating in the Olympics since ancient times. No Olympics were scheduled for AD 67, but Emperor Nero bribed officials to hold them then anyway, as he was planning to be in Greece at the time.
Nero competed in the four-horse chariot race, only his chariot had ten horses. He was thrown from the chariot and didn’t finish the race, but he was declared the winner anyway.
The only thing that can be rubbed on a baseball is a special mud gathered annually from the Delaware river. The man who collects it keeps the exact location secret: if challenged during his collection trips, he claims that he is gathering it to put on his roses.
Lance Armstrong (pictured) denied doping for many years but had to pay out millions in settlements when he was finally caught. But he is still incredibly rich, as he was an early investor in the taxi app Uber
Cheating is endemic to certain sports. There have long been rumours of motors hidden in bicycle frames, but only one person has ever been found guilty of it, a Belgian cyclist in 2016.
In 1957, the world record for the high jump was beaten by a Soviet athlete who had been wearing extra-bouncy soles in his shoes.
Australian aborigines used to play a game called ‘Marn Grook’, with balls made from kangaroo scrotums stretched and filled with grass.
It’s thought that Australian rules football, the only game played on an oval, was inspired by Marn Grook, only with balls made from possum skins. Bad news for possums, good news for kangaroos.
The Netherlands didn’t provide a team for the first modern Olympics in 1896 because they didn’t think it was fair for each athlete to pay their own expenses. The American athlete who won the discus gold medal in the same games hadn’t even seen a discus until the day before.
Some athletes are just completely bonkers. In 2017, an American runner ran a 100-mile race on so little sleep that for the last 12 miles she went blind. It took five hours for her sight to return.
Australian aborigines used to play a game called ‘Marn Grook’, with balls made from kangaroo scrotums stretched and filled with grass
Then there are the hallucinations. In 2019, a champion fell-runner running a 268-mile ultramarathon thought there were animals appearing out of the rocks on the course. She actually won this race, ‘despite needing to stop to express breast milk for her baby at various points along the route’.
There are facts and stories as good as these on almost every page, and not one of them did I previously know. This is a splendid book, and the perfect gift for any sports-mad person you know, which might even be you …
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