Sporting Achievements

[Benny]

Is the English / British inadequacy at the majority of sports down to the upbringing and nature of the culture in this country.

Looking at the countrys and nationalities of successful sportsmen it is usually a rich country that invests heavily in it's sporting foundations (Australia / US) or its a struggle against adversity to break out of the poverty/harsh life style.

In this country is it a case of win or lose, it's all marked as playing the game that counts. We dont seem to have the bite and drive to achieve. We have good sportsmen, we have the ability, but we constantly under achieve.  Why?

Andrew Castle on Talk Sport last night was saying that when he played, he knew, win or lose, his kids would be ok, money wasn't going to be an issue, etc....so where is the drive to win?

[FatBob]

i think personnally that our climate is a major factor in most things sporting
for example if you are a nice jonny foreigner type chappie from one of the far off sundrenched lands (that we used to own and in some cases colonised, sorry radders!) you automatically have a built in tolerance to conditions of bright sun and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees as well as the stifling and more draining humidity, which we as a nation dont, indeed our highest recorded temp is a measley 102(roughly), and that is once every fith leap year on a sunday !.
if like most serious athletes including footie, egg chasers and the like you start training from an early age in good ol blighty then you will build up stamina levels far above and beyond the likes of us mere computer nerds, but not a half of what somone whose used to 100deg every day will have.
muscle memory is another thing now being looked at but again its down to repitition and technique that way the body adapts and learns . but then jonny foreigner declares that instead of holding ALL the worlds sporting events in our beloved England the cheating so and so's would like to share the wealth and get our much bigger, sunnier, more humid EX-colonies involved so we send our athletes over two weeks before they are due to play and expect them to not only acclimatise to the different temps but also catch up on years of crap weather and then compete with people who although they may be on a par with skill levels are 20 years behind on the body conditioning and stamina levels required for such draining conditions. there are certain arguments though for certain sports, tennis for example only after a certain mr henman got to the quarters at wimbledon for the fourth time did some government nobody deceide that maybe just maybe we should allocate about £3.50 to the youngsters of this land and that would be enough to start a huge ball of enthusiam rolling for what i personally think to be a sport for toffee nosed gits like our tiiimmmaaayyyy interest is what kills tennis the complete lack of!!. cricket (sorry oldie) is another so called class event, the land of the old boys network, i cant think of many other sports where the team captain or team manager dont even choose the squad instead its left to the selection committee which is in turn a collection of old farts who stand around slammin each others willies in the door all day (i know this for a fact cos i went to a proper bo public skool in london) yet Englands cricketers have had an amazing run recently in the tests, now fall apart in a 1 dayseries and are getting slaughtered in the press. this tells us something that we should already know  that you CANNOT win everything all the time, if we did we would all be german!!(or worse aussies)
 football as we know is the biggest most high profile sport in england today, like it or not: its true, no other sport comes close to the column inches printed evey week even when its not the footy season. so like we just played in portugal temps 100 degees for afternoon games 80-90 in the evening with a good dose of phat humidity thrown in ,there is no way on earth we could sustain a campaign on foreign soil without an immense amount of luck(luck being no injuries ,no dodgy reffin decisions, crap ref decisions going for us!!!) and also the luck of the draw .
last world cup was another one seoul and japan leave it out fifa the start of the world cup was also the start of their monsoon season vast temperatures and minging humidity, every game we played had 1 good half and that was it (but we did stuff the argies WOOT)
 where are this years olympics at, oh look: greece: in the summer: have a wild stab at what the conditions for that will be like: scorchios.
we tried playin counterstrike in the premier league and got right royally thrashed: every game: not even a prayer, but we didnt care, we didnt just throw our toys out of the pram why cos were english ill tell you what we did, we hired some swede assasins and some dutch ones too and then dropped a couple of divisions and then unleashed the beast's. so therefore my solution for english sports is to hire some swedes then play croatia and switzerland every week.
go on the Engerland

[Dingo]

We just need the Olympic Committee to adopt "Military Clashes" as the next Olympic sport......we should do pretty well in that one?!    

[smilodon]

First - Because in Britain you either win everything or you loose. You either triumph utterly or you fail completely. No British team is allowed to just do well.

And Second - Because if you aren't competing in one of a handful of sports the fact that you might be a world champion will go utterly un-noticed by the British public and press.

1.

Henman is the fith best Tennis player in the world. From a pool of six billion he is number five. 5,999,999,995 people are worse than him but if he doesn't win Wimbledon he's failed utterly.

England were third favorites to win Euro 2004.  Out of 46 European Countries eligable to submit a squad we made the final cut and were rated third best. Out to Portugal on penalties and we're utter rubbish.

For the British, being good isn't enough. We have to be the best or what's the point. The Americans oddly enough believe in concepts such as 'be the best you can be', 'If you give 100% you'll always be a winner' just as much as they belive in and celebrate the actual winning of an event.

Henman wasn't going to win Wimbledon this year. There are four players better than him in the tornament. Irrespective of the fact that he lost to an unseeded player, he was going to loose to someone. And still all those pratts painted their faces red and white, wore daft Union Jack wigs and set themselves for a big fall.

We were third favorites to win Euro 2004 at 7/1. In other words out of seven attempts we'd be likely to win the Championship once. So odds on we weren't going to do it. We wern't the best so why did we expect to win?  It's not why did we support the team and cheer them on, but why did so many of us actuall fool ourselves into really thinking this was our year. It wasn't and it probably won't be for a few years yet, so don't torture yourselves.

Last Novemnber we won the Rugby World Cup. Why? Because we were the best Rugby team in the world bar none. We were clear favorites to win. We has stuffed all the real competition at least once and sometimes twice within the last 6 months. We had the greatest Captain in the history of the game, we had the best fly half in the world. The team knew it was the best, the fans knew they were the best and most importantly of all the opposition knew they were then best. We should have won and we did.

2.
 
England do win stuff. We excel at rowing and shooting. We are world class hockey players and have some of the best sailors in the world.  And I could go on.......

But these aren't the 'popular sports'. Our obsession with Football, Cricket, Athletics and Tennis seem to blind us as a nation to anything else.

Don't believe me? Hats off to Bradley Wiggins, world champion. And you have no idea who the hell I'm talking about do you? (no sneaky Googling please).

[Gh0st Face Killah]

Ahh yes good old Bradley. Another example of this is Neil Hodgson, last years world superbike champion and how many inches did that get in the press. Not a lot. The problem is because a few sports are regarded as "THe National Game" the sports we actually excel in are trivulised and forgotten about. Most people seem to forget that we are probably the best sailing nation in the world, have one of the best horse riding teams, but because they are seen as sports your average member of the public can drink themselves into a stupor and cheer/sing along most people aren't interested so when the players in "the national games" don't win people see it as a blow to our national pride.

[Anonymous]

I did a quick google search for UK World Champion. it turned up the following:

Darts, Snooker, Bog Snorkelling, Triathlon, Windsurfing, Gliding, boxing, Sailing, Rally Karting, Skydiving and lots more but I lost the will to live at that point.

Sadly, it is fashionable in this country to be ashamed of success <_<

[GRIM_REAPER]

yep at sydney in 2000 sailing was our most sucessfull sport, ben ainsley won the laser class and as now moved into the finn and in his 1st year in it he's wond the euro's and the worlds and the athens qualifiers, then theres ellen macarthur im sure u know about what she's done, shirley robertson won the olympic europe class in sydney the list goes on. but did sailing get any prime time on TV? course it didnt for the reasons gfk mentioned
oh and Bradley wiggins isnt he a cyclist?

[smilodon]

There's hope for us at last. And yep Wiggins is the pursuit cycling world champion.

And what about Tanya Streeter? The worlds greatest free diver, she obliterated the mens(505ft) and womens(446ft) world 'no limit' free diving record when she dove without an air supply to 525ft! :blink:

Cynically the USA always show her as being an American national because she has triple nationality (Cayman, British and USA). However she's actually a Roedean Girl and thoroughly English.

She's not so much as a world champions as a world phenomenon

So we do win lots of stuff after all

[Benny]

Fair enough, I'll hold my hands and admit I was concentrating on the 'mainstream' sports.  Maybe I should re-phrase it, why do we seem to under-achieve in the sports that we clearly have skilled sportspeople in.

Let's for arguments sake, take football. Do you think that the Greece national side has football team than us? They have progressed further, is that fluke? Individually the players are no better than ours, is it purely management?

I think what I was getting at was that as a nation we appear to be there or thereabouts, but we often, in the public arena, seem to lack the killer blow.

I rememeber Chris Boardman being touted as fantastic and rightly so after his pursuit endeavours, he went off to the tour and promptly bombed, accident I believe, and I've not heard much since (admittedly I haven't looked)

Save me trawling through google, because I haven't kept up with cycling for a while, how is Wiggins doing relatively. In the pursuit? Is in comparatively as good as say,
Indurain, LeMond, Armstrong, Merkx (sp?).  Maybe it would be worth listing, the sports we are good at (by good I mean champions), I think it would be interesting to see...

Edit and add as you see fit. Not being argumentative, would just like to see and perhaps get more interested in those sports as well as the ones we under achieve in.

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*Edit, I really wanted to see the free diving program on tv a while back, if anyone knows where I can get it, legally please, please shout, and slightly off topic, if you like that sort of thing I thought Luc Besson's 'The Big Blue' is a fantastic film, especially in a darkened room on a huge screen with the volume turned up...

[ChimpBoy]

Originally posted by smilodon+Jul 1 2004, 06:24 PM-->

[BigFatCat]

Going a little while back, England were individual and team World Champions in one of the country's largest participant sports. This sport gets a dedicated column in the largest national tabloid and still this achievement goes unnoticed.

Bob Nudd (MBE) is a 4 time World Champion.

Any guesses?

[Squonk]

Any guesses?

Fishing

[Benny]

See, the trouble with sports like fishing (and you can debate that being a sport elsewhere) is the spectator value.

Can someone argue that fishing is a spectator sport? As I ramble, all the good spectator sports pitch man against man in a battle of skill or power or both...

flame on.

[smilodon]

Chimpy- Fair point about the American veiw on competing rather than winning.  I'd still argue that their competative nature filters down throughout their endevours. They are passionate about everything, the training the selection the taking part and the winning. We just seem obsessed with the winning bit.

As to that English obsession with having to win or being ignored, I would agree it's a modern phenomenon. In years gone by we (and our press) were less scathing about those who did well without winning outright. That was more down to good manners than a celebration of effort over achievement. However we have never been a nation that celebrates second best (a throw back to Empire?) We didn't rip the National Football squads of the 70's and 80's to bits like we do now, but likewise we didn't celebrate their effort and endevour. We just ignored them. "England were knocked out of the Mexico World cup today............in other news..........!"

Benny - You can read about Tanya Streeter HERE. It's a bit of a naf site but you might find some useful stuff. I know something about free diving as I used to do it as a child/teenager. Not depth diving of course, but diving with out scuba gear. Before I became a fat git I used to be able to dive down to about 10 metres for about 2 minutes 30 seconds which wasn't bad for a kid. Now all I can manage is to  float for days and do Iceberg impressions.

As to your top ten list, apart from those sports already mentioned (shooting, sailing, motorsports etc.) I have no clue. Sport isn't my strong point but I'm sure others can think of stuff.

[0ni0n]

Paula Ratcliff rules her field