← HistoryExtra podcast
HistoryExtra podcast
Sport's strangest tales
00:46:32
James Harkin and Anna Ptaszynski delve into strange but true stories from the world of sport, covering Tudor football, Soviet fencing scandals and much more
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- [00:01]
Wendy
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John Baulkham
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- [01:51]
James Harkin
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine. Humans have been infatuated with sport for thousands of years, but what drove this obsession in the first place? And how did ancient pursuits evolve into the games we know and love today? On today's episode, John Baulkham speaks to QI researchers and hosts of the no Such Thing as a Fish podcast, James Harkin and Anna Tashinski about their new book on sporting history, discussing everything from doping to David Attenborough's impact on snooker.
- [02:33]
Anna Tashinski
James and Anna, welcome to the History Extra podcast today.
- [02:36]
John Baulkham
Thanks for having us, John.
- [02:38]
Ryan Reynolds
Thank you.
- [02:39]
Anna Tashinski
Now, listeners may already be familiar with you both through your own hugely successful podcast no Such Thing as a Fish, and of course your work on the BBC television series qi. But you've also just written a fantastic new book on the history of sport called A Load of Old Balls. And we're going to be talking about some of the interesting tidbits from that book today. To kick off then, let's go back to the very, very beginning. How long have humans been playing sport, do we think?
- [03:08]
John Baulkham
I like your use of the word kickoff, John. And I think one thing that we've noticed since we were writing this book is you can't send an email without some sporting cliche in there. It's just in there all the time. Because it seems like this inherent thing in humans, that sport is just everywhere, it's all around us. And we reckon that possibly humans were playing sport before we were even humans, because we've seen evidence of sport in animals. And if you look at the way that humans have evolved, our toes, for instance, are perfect for long distance running. If they were 20% longer, then running would take twice as much energy. And our jaws and our fists may well have evolved in order to help us fight to box. Because our jaws are very good at taking a punch and our fists are very good at landing them.
- [03:57]
Ryan Reynolds
Yes, we're built for punching and being punched. I think that's right. I think it sounds like such a cliche, but sport has been around for as long as humans have been around, and we have evidence of it that goes back at least 15,000 years to cave paintings of wrestling and bowling In Egypt over 5,000 years ago, the Mesoamerican ball game about 4,000 years ago. But there's no question it's gonna go back much further than that because as James says, we're built for it in a certain way. And also we just have this instinct to play, which is not singular. It's. Other animals have it. Across the world of nature, you see kangaroos play fighting, you'll have kestrels attack pine cones for fun, chimps play with dolls. Animals love fighting. But I think I was thinking about this earlier. I think we got language basically, didn't we? So we were able to turn this love of play into a sort of more organized thing that we call sport. And yeah, I think we've been doing it forever.
- [04:58]
Anna Tashinski
That's a really fantastic summary. And Anna, you mentioned the Mesoamerican ball game there. What was that? Because I think that's the oldest team sport that we know about, isn't it?
- [05:08]
Ryan Reynolds
It was essentially like a kind of combination of like, what would you say, James? Kind of lacrosse and football and basketball all at once, but very violent and possibly involving human sacrifice.
- [05:19]
John Baulkham
Yeah, I don't know which of those spots involves human sacrifice normally, but yeah. It's funny, because the carvings that we found do seem to suggest that there is some human sacrifice involved in the Mesoamerican ballgame. But when you look at what people have written about it, historians, they can't always seem to agree exactly who was sacrificed. Some people would say it was the winners, some people would say it would be the losers. Or some people would say, well, maybe it was just vanquished foes that we sacrificed, or that they sacrificed after the event, because Lycana says it was part of the legends of the Mayans. And so a lot of the ball games, they were probably taking place in sort of big festivals and events. Yeah.
- [06:02]
Ryan Reynolds
And although other people say, since you mention the various ways that people were sacrificed, I think people think it's also like a proxy for war, possibly because it was often played between different groups. And then when you look at it as a proxy for war, it's much less bad than actual war. If basically you say, look, we'll send all our best sports people, we'll compete, and the ones who win don't get sacrificed. You know, at least you're only sacrificing a few people rather than hundreds or thousands. And that's another thing about sport, right. Humans are the only animals, really, who do organized war. And sport is definitely a way of preparing to fight each other. I mean, all around the world in archeology, in history, you see many children's versions of weapons that are then used in war. In Bolivia, you get these tiny little bow and arrows which still get given to people of the Siriono tribe. When kids are born, even they receive a tiny bow and arrow. And it's also related. It's practicing for hunting and it's practicing for war. So they're so interlinked.
- [07:01]
John Baulkham
Yeah. I think these days we kind of think that sporting events, they kind of bring out the part of human beings that want to go to war, but they do it in a much less important way, where actually, you know, if we lose in the final of the Euros, it doesn't really matter, you know, Controversial.
- [07:18]
Ryan Reynolds
A controversial statement.
- [07:21]
Anna Tashinski
A very controversial statement, James. Yeah. And talking about football, then, you know, what we call association football or soccer is codified in the 19th century century, but the word itself can refer to any number of things through time, can't it? What would it have meant to someone, say, in medieval England?
- [07:38]
John Baulkham
Oh, well, that's a great question. We're not exactly sure why football is called football, because the obvious thing is that it's something that you play with Your feet and you're kicking the ball with your feet. But not necessarily all sports have got that association. It could be that the ball was about a foot in diameter and that's why they call it football, because it does seem like we used the word to describe the ball before we use the word to describe the foot. But actually, no one really knows, I think.
- [08:11]
Ryan Reynolds
And also it would have been so, so different from one place to the next, from one village to the next. As you say, things were codified in the 19th century for various very interesting historical reasons, but before that, there weren't the communications. And so you have a ball, the obvious thing to do is throw with your hands or kick with your feet. Who knows what else the rules entailed. We do know that in Tudor times it was called a game of beastly fury and extreme violence. And Henry VIII had something that was called football boots and so played some kind of it. But it would have varied so, so much.
- [08:44]
John Baulkham
Absolutely. And you would sometimes have games, even once it was being codified, you would have games between two teams who played very slightly different rules, and they had to decide whose rules they were going to use. Sometimes they would use one team's rule in the first half and one team's rule in the second half. Sometimes. There was one article we found in the newspaper archives of a game where I can't remember the two teams. It was somewhere in London, but about half time they decided to do away with the offside rule because no one could really work out how to do it. And they said that the game was much improved by the doing away with that law.
- [09:18]
Anna Tashinski
Fantastic. And football was also banned quite a lot, I think. Henry IV tried to ban football and also something called cock thrashing.
- [09:28]
John Baulkham
Yes, Cock thrashing was done on Shrove Tuesday, I think, wasn't it? And it was bad news for the cocks, I'm afraid, in that sport. But usually the reason that they did away with football or tried to ban it was because it was stopping people from doing that. Archery practice, I think that tends to be what we find. Lots of sports would get banned, but archery never did do, because we needed our archers for war.
- [09:52]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. It was always about being a distraction for the people from the important business of state. And it wasn't just Henry IV who banned it, it was kings and queens throughout English history and actually internationally. So I think Setblatter, in 2014, you might remember, mentioned the Chinese ball game called Kuzhu, which he said is the first kind of football played anywhere 2300 years ago. And Even that was banned under the Ming dynasty because, again, distraction from military training. So poor old football has been kicked to the curb multiple times, but it always fights back.
- [10:24]
Anna Tashinski
And talking about balls, that brings me onto the subject of sporting equipment. Firstly, what sort of things have balls been made of over time?
- [10:34]
John Baulkham
Oh, well, pretty much anything you can think of, really. I mean, I remember when I was at school and footballs were banned in my school for a short amount of time because it was causing too much violence in the playground. And so we would take cans of pop and crush them down and kick those around instead of footballs. And there was no less violence in those games, I could tell you, than in the actual soccer games. But if we found examples of the seal skin stuff with moss that the Inuits used in Fiji, we found examples of football type sports played with a large orange. Australian Aboriginal people would use kangaroo scrotums filled with grass.
- [11:12]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah.
- [11:13]
John Baulkham
So basically any rounded object, well, as you say, is.
- [11:17]
Ryan Reynolds
I mean, what did you say you used at school?
- [11:19]
John Baulkham
Like a flat can of pop?
- [11:21]
Ryan Reynolds
There you go. It doesn't even need to be rounded. Any kind of object you can kick. Actually, we just did another podcast about the Paralympics and I was reading about how blind football was invented in the 1920s in Melbourne. And that was invented when two blind factory workers got a tin can and put rocks in it so they could hear it. You know, in blind football today, you have a rattle inside the ball, and that was how that was invented. So, you know, any object you can kick will be kicked.
- [11:46]
John Baulkham
It's incredible, the blind football thing, isn't it? Because that's the only sport really, where you want your crowd to be as quiet as possible. Because the. I think there's actual rule, if you go and watch it, you're not allowed to make any noise because otherwise you won't be able to hear the rattle in the ball. And what would often happen is someone would come along, having never been to a blind football match before, and they would sort of cheer when something happened and everyone else in the crowd would go, sh. And that shushing was even louder than the cheering itself.
- [12:15]
Ryan Reynolds
And so it's like being a library.
- [12:18]
John Baulkham
Yeah, exactly.
- [12:20]
Anna Tashinski
And one of the things that becomes quite apparent from reading your book is just how many times sports have emerged or evolved from the specific situations that the inventors find themselves in at the time and perhaps the resources they have at their disposal. I think basketballs quite a good example of that, isn't it?
- [12:38]
John Baulkham
So I think basketball that was invented by James Naismith, he decided he Wanted an indoor game and so got some peach baskets, found them around, nailed them up to the balcony in his sports hall, and the idea was you would throw your ball into that, and pretty much that's the game. Hasn't changed a great deal since then, to be honest. But the height of his sports hole basically dictated the height of basketball nets today. So if his balcony was any higher or any lower, it would completely change the game because, you know, the height of the baskets right now are almost perfect for the very tallest humans to kind of slam dunk, which is one of the most important parts of the game. But if he'd have been in a much smaller sports hauler and much taller ones, that wouldn't have been part of the game at all.
- [13:25]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, and there is that thing where there's a. There's a brilliant photo of James Naismith where he's actually holding the original kind of peach basket under one arm and the ball in the other. You know, so many origin stories, you're not quite sure of the evidence he's there holding them. And I think it was the case that the net originally didn't have a hole in the bottom. And so instead of it falling through the net, you had to either pull it with a drawstring I think they invented later, or poke it out the top. Was that what they did?
- [13:55]
John Baulkham
They put a little hole in the basket, not big enough for the bowl to come out of, but big enough to stick a stick up there and prod it out. But, yeah, we did find some inventions of an actual net with a drawstring that let you turn it inside out to get the ball out. And that was relatively soon after the invention of the game. So we don't think it was too long where they had to come up with these ideas.
- [14:17]
Ryan Reynolds
But, I mean, you'd think that the most obvious idea is cutting the hole in the bottom.
- [14:21]
John Baulkham
Well, that's maybe true, but then how do you know that it's definitely been a basket?
- [14:26]
Ryan Reynolds
Good point.
- [14:27]
John Baulkham
You know what I mean? If it stays in there, then at least you know it's been in there. And that was the same with football goals, wasn't it? It was like, you know, someone would take a shot and it was up to the referee to decide whether it went in between the post and the crossbar. And you and I know, having been to lots of games, Anna, that there's enough times when you're watching a football match and you're sat right there and you don't know whether it's gone in and the whole crowd cheers. But it hasn't gone in at all.
- [14:51]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah.
- [14:52]
John Baulkham
And it was only after, I think, as an Everton fan had felt he was very badly done to because his team had not been given a goal when they should have done, who thought, well, I'm going to invent the net and then from then on we'll know if it's gone in.
- [15:04]
Ryan Reynolds
Yes. Yeah. And I think, wasn't he this is in the late 19th century. And as you say, he's like, God damn it, we weren't given that goal. Invented the net. And then he did loads of other amazing stuff. He was an engineer, he built the world's largest road tunnel, he planned the layout of New Delhi. But he always said his proudest invention was the football net. And quite right too.
- [15:27]
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- [16:52]
Anna Tashinski
Yeah, so obviously some sports have evolved quite drastically over time, haven't they? And also new sports have sprung out and branched off in all sorts of directions. And people have often tried to bend the rules of existing sports and tried to cheat. Is cheating something that's hardwired into us, do you think?
- [17:11]
John Baulkham
Yeah, I think we came to that conclusion, Anna, didn't we? And not just because we're both massive cheats ourselves. I think we found some studies going into the science of it where people would get what's known as a cheetah's high whenever they were able to sort of subvert the rules. They would get a, you know, a shot of some kind of neurotransmitter into their brain that would make them feel better. But it really does feel the case that everyone's always trying to slightly push the limits in sport. And usually what happens is one person comes up with some incredible new way of doing things. Like, for instance, famously, Dick Fosbury did the Fosbury flop and went over backwards on his high jump. And then either everyone starts doing it, which was the case there, I think a couple of years after he came up with that idea. You know, he wasn't even in the top 50 in the world because everyone had taken the idea and run with it or jumped with it, or they'll ban it and it'll be no longer part of the rules and no one will be able to do it again. But I really think innovation is one of the most important parts of sport that we found anyway.
- [18:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. And it can grow from this cheating or rule bending. I mean, really, it's unnatural to obey rules, isn't it? We want to win and all animals want to win evolutionarily. Right. You. It's just all about competing with each other and outdoing, you know, the person who might spread his seed instead of you. I think literally it comes down to that. So we desperately want to beat each other and we've placed these rules, these arbitrary rules around ourselves, which makes it very fun and interesting. But in the end, all our instincts are saying, yeah, but find a way around it. I mean, whether it's. It's at the lowest levels, like Michael Palin was once disqualified from a Conkers tournament for cheating. Or there was. There was a time when the Algonquin Round Table, you know those. Dorothy Parker and all her mates in the 20s and 30s, they were really into croquet and there were huge fallings out between them over cheating. And the women used to use their skirts to move the balls around. And you can't escape it. Where there's sport, there's cheaters.
- [19:16]
John Baulkham
I think with those. Was it like. Cause they had the big hoop skirts, they would kind of surreptitiously stand next to it and then lift the skirt up, put it over the bowl so no one could see it, and then just sort of jimmy it around?
- [19:28]
Ryan Reynolds
I believe so, yeah.
- [19:29]
John Baulkham
So amazing.
- [19:30]
Ryan Reynolds
Feels like it would be obvious to me. But, yeah, maybe you didn't want to accuse the lady of cheating.
- [19:35]
John Baulkham
Yeah. You don't want to say what you're doing under that dress, do you?
- [19:38]
Ryan Reynolds
No. Lift up your skirts, madam.
- [19:40]
Anna Tashinski
Yeah, of course, there's numerous ways in which people can cheat. They can throw games and they can use. Yeah. They can adapt their equipment. What's the most outrageous contraption that someone has invented in a bid to win a game, do you think?
- [19:53]
John Baulkham
Well, I think, like, that was almost a leading question to talk about. Boris Sonishenko, perhaps, who was the amazing pentathlete fencer. So the pentathlon, they have all these different events and one of them is fencing, and he rigged up his sword, his epee, I think it was, so that even when he missed someone, if he pressed a button, it would count as a hit. Because when you're sword fighting, basically you've got your metal sword and you've got a metal sort of shield on your chest, and when those two things touch, they make a connection, and the computer can tell if you've got a point or not. But he managed to set it up with a button. And the thing was, he was a bit of a legend. He was getting on a bit, and I think he fell under pressure because, you know, these new young fences were coming up and they were better than him, but he was a bit of a legend. So even when he was missing and he was getting the points, everyone thought, well, maybe he's just that good that we didn't notice. Maybe he was, even though it looked like his sword went two feet above that guy's head, maybe he's just such a genius that he actually hit him. And it took. I think it took a child in the audience who noticed what was happening. And then that child notified a woman whose name I unfortunately forget, who was like a great Olympian who sort of went out and said, look, this guy's cheating. And then they checked his equipment and sure enough, he was.
- [21:18]
Ryan Reynolds
That's quite Emperor's New Clothes, isn't it? Everyone is going, well, I must have misunderstood. It must just be an optical illusion. The king must be wearing clothes. This kid going, no, he's not hitting anyone. Yeah. I have to say, if one of my favorite ways of cheating, which involved another, I think, quite advanced contraption, was in baseball, which was that they used to do this thing called caulking the bats in baseball, which is where you hollow out the inside of a bat and you fill it with cork instead. And the idea was that it makes the bat lighter, so when you hit the ball, you can hit it harder and it flies further. And weirdly, it's since been shown that it doesn't really help. But people used to do this to cheat. It was very illegal. And there was this game in the 1990s where the Cleveland Indians are playing the Chicago White Sox. And the White Sox accused the Indians player Albert Bell of corking his bat. And he had corked his bat. So the bat was confiscated by the umpire, and they were like, we'll investigate this bat later. If it turns out to have been corked, then you're going to have to forfeit the game. You've lost it now. It was corked. And so what they had to do, the Cleveland Indians was get a player, another player called Jason Grimsley, who wasn't on the field at that moment, to climb up into the. The air vents in the stadium and crawl around for almost an hour. He was in there boiling hot, this massive guy. And he took with him a replacement bat. And he's trying to find the umpire's room where he's put the illegal bat so he can swap it with a replacement bat. And it's just. It's this extraordinary tale of the lengths people go to. You know, he's removing ceiling tiles. At one point, he goes to the wrong place, removes a ceiling tile, comes face to face with a janitor who's lying on a sofa, looks up at the ceiling, sees professional famous baseball player Jason Grimsley above his head. And then it's just like, I'm gonna just close my eyes again. But, yeah, climbed in, replaced the bat, climbed out again, made his getaway. I would love that story.
- [23:18]
Anna Tashinski
Yeah. And that is just the most audacious thing you can do, I think.
- [23:22]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah.
- [23:23]
Anna Tashinski
Now, when did doping become a thing?
- [23:25]
John Baulkham
Yeah, so I think it was mid 20th century, really, if we're thinking about steroid abuse.
- [23:32]
Ryan Reynolds
Oh, like that. Proper illegal, I was gonna say, because going, you know, back in time, I guess the. I think people often doped in ANC with stuff that probably didn't help them, like ancient gladiators. I feel like they ate ground up testicles and things like that. You know, people have always had performance enhancing things. Not their own. No. Although maybe that would help. And the stories of the early Tour de France in the early 1900s was amazing. People would have strychnine and huge amounts of alcohol and cocaine and rubbing into their eyeballs. But I guess that's doping that. It's unclear the extent to which any of that helped or hindered them.
- [24:10]
John Baulkham
Yeah.
- [24:10]
Ryan Reynolds
But, yes, doping, that definitely worked. But later on, wasn't it the steroids?
- [24:14]
John Baulkham
Definitely mid 20th century. And it was the Eastern Bloc was doing it and they were starting to win everything. And then there was an American scientist, slash bodybuilder, slash sports scientist, who went over and found out the tricks that they were doing. And instead of notifying the authorities and saying, let's ban this, he decided to do it himself and decided that the American athletes needed to have not just the same steroids, but better steroids than the Eastern Bloc people. But actually, in the Olympics, I think the first official doping was a shooter, I think, who had some alcohol, because alcohol was a banned substance. And for a long time, actually, it was easy to test for alcohol, but not so easy to test for other things. And so alcohol was one of the substances that people would get pulled up for the most. And obviously, if you're shooting, then it can calm you down, it can help you to steady yourself, unless you have, let's say, two or three. But if you just have the right amount of alcohol, I think it has been shown to have some kind of steadying effect on your body. So, yeah, this Swedish shooter got done for it. And the interesting thing was, I think the Swedish team was the one who wanted to get alcohol banned in the first place because they thought that it should be a cleaner spot. But it was them who got done.
- [25:35]
Ryan Reynolds
For it, I think, basically, wasn't it? That push came to shove after a moment in the mid-1960s where there was one athlete who did go over the top, failed to drink just the half pint that slightly gives you the edge, and drank 10 beers, an entire bottle of cognac, and then fired all his bullets into a mound beside the target before falling unconscious. And they thought, okay, we should sort this out. Which I think is a reminder of something quite interesting that's come up again when people are sort of talking about the Enhanced Games. I don't know if you've read about this. There's that billionaire who's trying to set up the Enhanced Games, where all doping is allowed, but doping is banned. I mean, I guess because it's cheating, gives you an unfair advantage, but not really because of that, because if we could all dope, it would be fair. It's banned because it's really dangerous and if you allow people free rein to take loads of substances, then it's bad for you. So, yeah, they thought, look, we can't have someone randomly firing bullets whilst out of his mind. We are going to have to Ban this. But we actually spoke to an Olympic archer recently for another podcast we're doing, and he said it's known in archery, too, that a drink or two will help your archery as well, which makes a lot of sense. Slightly relaxes you.
- [26:45]
John Baulkham
Yeah, I think he only does that recreationally, though.
- [26:48]
Ryan Reynolds
Yep. And I'm not naming him now.
- [26:52]
Anna Tashinski
We've talked about cheating, we've talked about doping. There are, of course, a lot of factors that motivate athletes to compete completely legitimately. For the love of the game, of course, and also to make a statement, too. I was really struck when reading the book by this case study where you talk about a cyclist named Annie Londonderry in the 19th century. Can you tell listeners why she was so special?
- [27:15]
John Baulkham
Yeah, I think Hannah, she's one of your favorites.
- [27:18]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, she's a personal hero. She's amazing. She was a Jewish mother of two or three kids in the 1890s. She was about 20 and she'd never ridden a bike before. And she cycled around the world, became the first woman to cycle around the world, the second person to cycle around the world and did it much faster than the person who did it before her. And it's just an extraordinary story of someone who, I suppose, led a life where you'd think it was going to be very unremarkable, the life of a housewife, and who knows what motivated her. But you can speculate about, you know, you suddenly feel repressed and trapped and, you know, you think you're going to fit into this little bracket and you decide, I'm not going to do that. And she. She worked in the media a little bit, so she had a real eye for a good story. So she basically said that she started doing this cycling trip as a bet. So she overheard two men in a pub saying, I bet no woman could cycle around the world. And she said, I'll take you up on that. You know, pay me $100 or whatever if I do it and I'll pay you if I don't. And she set off around the world and had these amazing adventures. She got kidnapped in the Sino Japanese war. She was mugged, I think at gunpoint. She broke her arm at one point. She completed a lot of the journey by boat rather than bike, but we won't hold that against her. And she made it.
- [28:43]
John Baulkham
We're not sure exactly how much of the story is real and how much of it isn't real. Right. We're pretty sure she went round the world one way or another. But like, for instance, she Claimed to have had over 200 marriage proposals while she went around the world. I guess not out of the question, like Hannah said. Yeah, she was kidnapped in France. She supposedly hunted tigers in India. She always apparently carried a pearl handled shotgun wherever she went. So we don't know how much of this is true because she was working selling advertising in newspapers, and we think the bet probably wasn't true. But that almost doesn't matter, really. I mean, the actual feat of going all the way around the world at that stage as a woman was an incredible thing. Even in America, it was to cycle round. You couldn't just wear trousers because there were lots of parts of America where they wouldn't allow women to wear trousers. So she would have to change from her trousers into her petticoats to go through certain states. But then, of course, once she finished, the press were a bit sniffy about her. And the Kansas City Star reported that someone said, if any Londonderry story be true, there is no glory in such a trip for a man after a woman has accomplished it.
- [29:54]
Anna Tashinski
So you don't necessarily think that she was successful in changing people's minds then about women in sport?
- [30:00]
Ryan Reynolds
I think she was. And I think women cycling then generally had a massive, massive social and political impact. I think it was Susan B. Anthony who said that women riding bikes has done more for women's liberation or emancipation than anything else. It was really revolutionary time where there was a big pushback against women cycling. But I always think the reason there's ever a big pushback against anything is because it's making ground. So doctors were warning that, you know, women would become unable to perform sexually or they turn into men. Even if they kept riding bikes, it was very bad for their health. This was a sign that they were doing it and it was a way of getting some freedom. Finally, at the end of the 19th century, when road services are good enough, bikes come into being. It's a way they can slightly get away from their constraints. And also, another interesting thing, sorry, about Annie Londonderry is the interplay, obviously, of sports and money, always, and sports and sponsorship. And it speaks to her wiliness. Again, she wasn't called Annie Londonderry, she was called Annie Cohen Kopchowski, but she was sponsored by Londonderry Springwater, a brand of water at the time. And she actually changed her name and she rode around with this huge billboard on her, you know, saying Londonderry Spring Water, but changing her name for the sake of that advertising.
- [31:15]
John Baulkham
The only other person we could find about that was Jimmy White, the snooker player who changed his name to Jimmy Brown when he was sponsored by HP Sauce. But I think, like, Annie Londonderry maybe, like, didn't change so many opinions at the time, but she was part of the huge wave of change that was happening and, you know, certainly it was a great thing that she did.
- [31:37]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, I actually. I always bang on about this book because this research for our book meant that we spent a lot of time in old newspaper archives. Even though when you read articles today about attitudes in, let's say, the 19th century, about whether it's about women playing sports, whether it's about, you know, African Americans playing sports, whether it's about Aboriginal Australians playing cricket, if you read articles today, it will always say the whole of society was against it. There was so much skepticism. No one wanted women in sports, no one wanted black people in basketball or whatever. It's never true. If you read the newspapers, I've found ordinary people loved it, always loved. They just want to see more sports and they don't judge. But it's people in positions of power. It would always be rogue doctors, politicians. It's a bit like how women's football was banned by the FA because it was basically becoming more popular than men's and it was threatening this big FA institution in the early 20th century. So I think sometimes we have this idea that everyone was so prejudiced and people are just like that. I think that was one of the things I really learned in this book, was that newspapers were positive, the journalists report positively on all these things. It was just a few people higher up and it wasn't in the powers that be's interest to let them get too far with this progress. Sorry, there's my rant, my revolutionary rant over.
- [32:52]
Anna Tashinski
And James and Anna, as you kind of alluded to, there, sport is nothing without its fans. Have athletes always had their own obsessive fans or ultras on the sidelines?
- [33:03]
Ryan Reynolds
I think they have, and the ultras is the negative side of fandom. But it's important to be aware that it can turn nasty. Sport isn't all, you know, this, like, joyous celebration of human love for each other. But I think, yeah, without fan sport would be nothing. Right. It wouldn't generate the interest to allow it to happen. And there's so much that doesn't change over the years. There's even. I remember reading about football whispers being a thing that was really popular in the turn of the 20th century. And they were basically football chants. We're not really sure how they went now. But there are lots of references to. At parties people would start singing football whispers. Or at little social gatherings it'd be like, oh, and the well known current football whispers was chanted. So chanting in football, was it Elgar.
- [33:49]
John Baulkham
Who came up with the first chant that we know about in football? But actually there was chanting in American sport before that. Because if you go to the first Olympics, it was a bit of a shambles, the 1896 Olympics in Athens, because a lot of people turned up and just decided to take part. You could, you didn't have to necessarily reach certain levels in order to take part. You could just turn up. But the American team was almost professional because they all came from Harvard and America had this collegiate system where they were all, you know, doing athletics against each other. So they were really, really professional. And that's why they did really very well in that first Olympics. But when they arrived, they were singing like Harvard, Harvard, rah, rah, rah or something like this. And the king of Greece was so taken by it that he invited the American athletes to a dinner and then asked them to do their funny sporting chants. Didn't they, Anna, do you remember?
- [34:47]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. People loved it. It was this revelation. Oh my God, you can chant along to sports while you're watching them. Yeah. I got invited for a special breakfast.
- [34:57]
Anna Tashinski
And in the 20th century, sports have had to adapt to things like television formats and broadcasting rules. One of the favorite things I learned while reading the book is that David Attenborough had quite an impact on tennis and also snooker as well, I think.
- [35:13]
John Baulkham
Yeah, he did. Well, it was in part of his job as controller of BBC2. And they were looking for new sports because color television had come in and they wanted to sell it to the nation. And what better way of doing it than snooker where the color is inherent to the game? And so he invented or co invented the TV show Pop Black, which was still going when I was a kid, I think. And some of the early examples of snooker on television were really interesting because my favorite part of snooker watching it now, is the first 25 minutes of any frame where no one actually pots anything. And they just play safety shot after safety shot after safety shot and nothing really happens. But in those days they thought no one would want to watch that on television. And so before the cameras were rolling, they would get a third party to come and just whack all the balls so they were all around the table and in decent place to pot. And then the cameras would start rolling and then they'd have their actual game, but yeah, tennis as well. Anna, can you remember what that is? Yeah.
- [36:13]
Ryan Reynolds
So tennis again. He really wanted to increase the popularity of tennis, make that sport people watch tele for. But the problem was that the balls were white at the time and it wasn't so easy to see on TV sets. And so he sort of commissioned this whole committee to research what might be the best color for tennis balls to be. And they tried all these different colors and eventually settled on optic yellow, which is what we have today. Although I think Wimbledon was very slow to take it up because they like the all white theme, don't they, at Wimbledon?
- [36:41]
John Baulkham
But it's like another thing with the television was crown green bowling. So crown green bowling used to be really popular on television and not that long ago, like people might have forgotten, but when Sky Sports first came along, if you go in the newspapers, it's crown green bowling, crown green bowling, crown green bowling. A little bit of premier league football maybe, but then crown green bowling, crown green bowling, it was on all the time. And to make that more popular again, they changed the colors of the balls. And what was really interesting is that the players all hated them. And they all said, well, this one's bending too much or this one's bending the wrong way, or this one's too heavy, or this one's too light. But actually, when you got rid of the collar and did it in a blind test, they were all absolutely identical. But because there was this visual change, whenever anyone made a mistake in the game, they just blamed it on the new balls. And they also had to wear these kind of polyester T shirts that would make them look better on tv. And they all hated those because they just made them sweat profusely.
- [37:44]
Anna Tashinski
And to conclude, James and Anna, what lessons have you taken away from researching and writing this book for all the controversies and the raw passion? Does sport truly bring us together?
- [37:56]
John Baulkham
Yeah, I think it can. I mean, there's obvious times when it hasn't. The football war in Honduras, the Balkan wars, a big powder keg of that was a football match. So it can cause problems, as we all know, but I think overall an overarching effect is that it is a force for good. What do you think we've just had the Olympics and the Paralympics is starting today as we're recording this. And I think it's really great when. Because the whole world does come together and we all see a Turkish shooter who doesn't have any equipment just being amazing, or, you know, a French swimmer who just obliterates all the competition, or indeed, an Australian breakdancer who can't breakdance. But it brings everyone together and it gives us something to talk about. And I do find, like I always found when I traveled, if I go to a country where I don't know the language, I can sit in a bar and if there's a football match on, I can gesture and communicate with people and say, that was never offside or what a great goal or whatever, because there is something that brings almost everyone in the world together.
- [39:04]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah, I agree. Absolutely a force for good, despite the drawbacks. And we actually spoke to all the sports fans we knew, or a lot of them, at the start of this book to find out what inspired them to follow sport, to play sport. And the variety, the intelligence, the incisiveness of every response I got, and some from friends, that was quite surprising from them. You know, you wouldn't expect that level of real thoughtfulness about why they love sport. And no one gave the same answer I found so instructive that you can appreciate it from thousands of different angles. And actually, but one specific angle that I think I love, maybe my favorite chapter is the one we wrote on endurance, because I do find these feats of endurance when people subject themselves to ultramarathons or they sail across the Pacific or whatever on their own, whatever it is, I find them extraordinary. And there's a really interesting study that we mention where it's about whether or not humans push themselves to their limit when they think they are. And basically, people are asked to cycle at first as fast as they possibly can for about 10 seconds. And the amount of power they generate as they cycle is recorded. So they've cycled as fast as they possibly can, power's generated, and then they are asked to just cycle as fast as they can for as long as they can and only stop cycling. So they're on a cycling machine and only stop when they've really run out of stamina, when they really can't go on anymore. So the people did that in the study, cycled on and on and on as fast as they could, maybe lasted 10, 11, 12 minutes. Eventually, they just sort of collapse and stop and say, I can't go on any longer. And then the third stages, the researchers said, okay, straight away, I want you just to cycle for 5 seconds or 10 seconds as fast as you can again. And as soon as they're told to do that, they generate almost as much power as they did the first time. And I think the people who do these ultra marathons and the People who achieve extraordinary things in sport are people who've sort of understood that. And they've understood that the first time your brain says you can't go on any longer, you can just ignore it because you can go on so much longer. And it's these people who've learned, if you keep pushing through that silly message, you can do so much more than you think you can. So I think maybe that's one of the things I learned.
- [41:16]
Anna Tashinski
Amazing. And finally, in the spirit of your own pod, can you each present us with your fact of the week?
- [41:23]
John Baulkham
Ah. Oh, God. This is. We get this pretty much in lots of interviews that we do. And as soon as anyone puts you on the spot, it's almost impossible to remember a single fact. But I did prepare ahead of this and I looked in my files for some facts that I got from BBC History Magazine, which is quite a lot, actually. But here's one. For instance. In 1994, the women's rugby World cup was canceled with just a few weeks notice. So the teams just played each other anyway. And today that is considered to be the official tournament for that year. It's just amazing. I just think that it just shows with sports. It's like you do have these people who are organizing and stuff like that, but if you have 22 people and a rugby ball and a bit of land, you can play rugby. You don't need a television deal. You don't need, you know, the organizers telling you who's going to play each other when. You can just do it. And that's what they did.
- [42:19]
Ryan Reynolds
And Anna, it's always a contest between two. Can I mention two?
- [42:24]
Anna Tashinski
You can mention two, go ahead.
- [42:26]
Ryan Reynolds
Okay. One is that according to the Lacrosse Federation, the original games of lacrosse involved 100,000 players. It's just. What the hell.
- [42:37]
John Baulkham
That's the thing is, Anna, all you need is 100,000 people, 100,000 sticks and one ball and you can just play. That's the great thing about school, as.
- [42:46]
Ryan Reynolds
Long as you're a bit popular. So there's that. And then I also love the fact that the cricketer Sir Garfield Sobers, Gary Sobers, played. I've emphasized that for a reason, because he scored his last test century while completely drunk. And that's also a really funny story that we mentioned in the book, but I love it.
- [43:07]
Anna Tashinski
James Harkin, Anna Tushinski, thanks very much for your time.
- [43:10]
John Baulkham
Thanks for having us, John.
- [43:11]
Ryan Reynolds
Thank you so much.
- [43:13]
James Harkin
That was James Harkin and Anna Tushinski, researchers on the BBC TV series QI and also the co hosts of the podcast no Such Thing as a Fish. Their new book, A Load of Old the QI History of Sport, is available now. If you enjoyed this episode, then make sure to check out our episode with David Horsball where he charts Britain's long love affair with sport, from the brutality of medieval jousts to the mega books of the Premier League. You can find the link to that in the episode description. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Lewis Dobbs.