Almost half a century ago, a bloke called Dick Fosbury came up with a new way of getting over the high jump bar. Today, the Fosbury Flop is the sport’s standard. It may not be the coolest name and it may well have raised a few questions about Dick’s performance in other areas but Fosbury…
Category: Sports
The Ashes: God save our Mo
There are so many ways we could begin today’s entry. Whitewash would be a good word to start with. Annihilation. Massacre. Humiliation. Thrashing. These are all excellent words and certainly apt for the occasion. Perhaps we could take a lead from the Barmy Army and break into song, with something subtle like ‘five-nil’ repeated over…
The Ashes: The sweetest victory of all
In one of the more celebrated moments in Australian political history, Opposition Leader John Hewson innocuously asked Prime Minister Paul Keating why he wouldn’t call an early election. Keating fairly salivated before answering: “Because I want to do you slowly.” Above the ensuing hilarity, he continued: “There has to be a bit of sport in…
The Ashes: We’ve urned it
Another Ashes Test, another easy win for Australia. This could get boring if our favourite national pastime wasn’t making Poms suffer. The drubbing has been so emphatic that a colleague not generally known for her tolerance of Englishmen on the sporting field admitted midway through day four to feeling strange pangs of sympathy for our…
The Ashes: Do you smell something burning?
The thwack of bat on ball, the cries of ‘howizzeeeeeeee’, the soporific lull of the commentary. These are all sounds which, like the cicada’s never-ending mating call, have heralded Aussie summers of old. At some point in the last few years though, when thwack became the sound of Aussie wickets falling or our bowlers being…
Le Tour: The unthinkable happens
A couple of weeks ago, when Andy Murray became the first Brit in living memory to reach a Wimbledon final, UK writer A.A. Gill pondered the alarming repercussions of the Scot actually winning. “The British have become supremely good at failing to win,” he wrote. “We joke about it. We are comfortable with it. We…
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