Category Archives: Sport & Leisure

Post-Olympic blues for elite job seekers

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There is growing evidence that some of the sports stars we were cheering on during the Olympic Games in London last year are in another race – for a job.

According to various media reports, many athletes have stopped competing and are now finding out that austerity Britain isn’t necessarily the best place to be looking for work.

Some say ’dozens’ of the 553 athletes who represented Team GB in London are job-hunting. At least 64 have quit their sports for a variety of reasons, while a further 24 are undecided about their futures, according to research published by the BBC. Continue reading →

Sports books – what are we paying for?

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Having recently reviewed the autobiography of three-time Olympic slalom champion Tony Estanguet, I spent a few days trawling the sports biography section of my local book shop. I was struck by the number of books by people whose literary skills I have good reason to question. So what do we think we’re getting when we buy a sportsperson’s autobiography?

I’ve seen the speculation that people who bought Lance Armstrong’s books may try to sue him on the basis that they were mostly a pack of lies. The BBC is reporting that some US readers are trying to launch a class action lawsuit against the disgraced cyclist. Continue reading →

Row, row, row your, er, canoe

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Canoeists everywhere get frustrated when their sport’s described as ‘rowing’.

It seems only yesterday that we were busily collecting entries for ‘hapless sub-editor of the year’ and ‘clueless sports reporter of the Olympic Games’ in which our gallant entrants got to ask Britain’s top kayakers how long they’d been rowing, how much their oars cost and topped their journalistic credentials off with such classic headlines as “Oar-some duo rowing for Gold!!!!!”
Continue reading →

Une Histoire D’Equilibre

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French three-time Olympic gold medalist Tony Estanguet has published his autobiography. The book, “A story of balance” (or, more accurately, “Une Histoire D’Equilibre”) is an account of his life in canoeing, how he got to the top and how he survived there.

From the early days watching his father Henri and older brother Patrice winning, respectively, world championship titles and an Olympic bronze medal Estanguet tracks his own progress towards success at two Olympic Games (gold in Sydney and Athens), discusses how he felt about disappointment in Beijing (9th place) and how he bounced back to win gold in London. Continue reading →

Life jacket or buoyancy aid?

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Press coverage after a canoeing tragedy tends to focus on the safety precautions that those involved took. Often one reads the throwaway line ‘the victim was not wearing a lifejacket’, journalistic short-hand for ‘the person involved took inadequate precautions and therefore bears some responsibility for the fact that he or she perished’.

In the case of the recent canoeing accident on Loch Gairloch in the Scottish Highlands that claimed the lives of four people, three of them children and one aged just two, one of the survivors, Garry Mackay, has described how the children were wearing what a news website described as “buoyancy aid jackets”. Continue reading →