by H. G. Nelson
Australians instinctively know exactly where the feet have to be planted for a winning gold medal heave. Every schoolkid knows how much power has to be generated by the toes and hips, in the skip across the circle of brawn before the shot is fired skywards into the Olympic record book.
The nation knows there cannot be a big pause after entering the ring before the fling. Any pause allows nerves of failure to agitate. On release, the big hoist is often accompanied by a blood-curdling scream that can scare the stadium crowd, creating blood-dripping drama until it’s grins all round as another Olympic record is broken.
In the build-up to the 2021 Tokyo Olympics Ryan Crouser threw the 7.26-kilogram (16-pound) mass of metal to a new world record of 23.37 metres. He broke a longstanding world record by 25 centimetres. That is some heave!
The discus was originally a weapon used by ancients to clobber opponents in the far distance. It is one of the ancient disciplines that gets a guernsey in the modern Games. The balletic twirl by the competitor inside the cage of contest generates energy that travels down the arm and into the discus, which is sent on its way to golden glory or silver or bronze or potato.
In 1896, men danced the delicate twirl for a hurl. Women began throwing in 1928. It’s a sport where it is important to let a big one go, early. Throw down a gauntlet. Get on the board with a fat PB. Then watch the field sputter in the wake as they play catch-up!
In 1896, men danced the delicate twirl for a hurl. Women began throwing in 1928.
The hammer throw was introduced into the Olympic Games in 1900, possibly from a suggestion by the USOC champion, John Flanagan. The sport has competitive roots that can be traced back for centuries to warriors in Ireland. On the day of judgement in Paris 1900, Big John won gold, Truxtun Hare silver, and Josiah McCraken was third. It was an all-American podium finish (that is, if the podium had been invented at that point). American athletes had a big advantage. They could study the hammer throw at universities across America. This Stateside tossing trio had bugger-all to beat, as there were only five competitors.
Training, diet, visualisation and completing a PhD in hammer history and technique put Flanagan in the box seat for more golden success. He stepped into the ring of toss and won hammer gold at the next three Olympics. Not sure why any other throwers made the trip.
The hammer throw was an exclusively male event for decades. It is only in recent times that the IOC has reinvented itself as an equal opportunity employer. Women finally contested the hammer in the Sydney 2000 Olympics for the first time. Kamila Skolimowska from Poland won gold with an Olympic record throw of 71.16 metres.
The hammer talks to a new generation through the Marvel Comics character Thor. He was an ancient winner with a big and powerful hammer, associated with thunder and lightning, trees and strength. He is part of the pagan parade of Germanic heroes and a big figure in the Old Norse myths. Today Thor is strutting his stuff on the silver screen in Marvel superhero movies, starting in 2011 with Thor, which has spawned three sequels. The central character is played by Australian fitness freak, hammer thrower and actor Chris Hemsworth. From what he has shown on the silver screen, Chris would be no slouch in the Olympic hammer event.
The Thor big screen experience points to a future direction for Olympic sport. An avalanche of interest, money and technology is being tipped into e-sports, threatening to consign many of the traditional Olympic sporting competitions to the trashcan of history.
Sadly, those ancient war sports, the pole vault and javelin, will need YouTube cartoon heroes to make them popular with a generation of athletes keen to compete from the couch at the highest level. No one in the IOC is quite sure how to make hip again those very old-school wartime classics, the 10,000-metre walk and the 3000-metre steeple chase.
Wars today are being fought by troops camped on a stool behind a computer screen in a double garage in the deserts of Utah or the frozen wastes of Siberia. A mouse is used to activate weapon systems on unmanned platforms in constant circulation above the enemy.
When hand–eye coordination, finger-tip keyboard skills and rapid joystick activity are the athletic tools of war today, how long before they become the basis of Olympic competition?
Remote-controlled drones and weapon systems lurking on ships kilometres offshore are the future of combat. Humans are often far away from the front line and in a future fracas they need never go near the business end of a bomb again.
Is it any wonder that e-sports are taking over? When hand–eye coordination, finger-tip keyboard skills and rapid joystick activity are the athletic tools of war today, how long before they become the basis of Olympic competition?
If all else fails, there will always be drone racing and competitive hacking. These are sports that can be practised in the bedroom, in pyjamas with ugg boots on, enabling the sports stars of tomorrow to win gold without leaving home.
In a desperate bid to remain relevant to the modern generation, the IOC included kite surfing, surfing, skateboarding and break-dancing on the Tokyo card. These ‘wild’ sports are seen by the inhabitants of head office as happening, groovy, cool sporting pursuits. But will they bellow ‘Olympics’ to the younger set?
The Tug of War
Could it make a timely comeback in Brisbane 2032?
What a great sport. But like pigeon shooting it was there and then suddenly it disappeared!
The Olympic Games are subject to pressure from sporting organisations that desperately want their sport included at Olympic level. The argument is that if running and swimming are in, why is our sport excluded? Sports fall in and out of favour and fashion with the IOC, which is tasked to juggle the fortnight of competition and make it fit the ever-expanding budget and the television schedule.
There are obviously certain must haves! The inferno would not be the Olympics if events like track and pool events of the 100 metres, 200 metres, 400 metres and the marathon were dumped. But lesser events and sports without great clout come and go with the regularity of the tides.
The 1900 Games saw the introduction of the tug of war. This crowd favourite was part of team events until the Antwerp Games in 1920. The terms and conditions varied. In 1900 there were six in a team, in 1904 five turned out, and for the last three Games it was an eight-a-side competition. If the images from those Olympics can be believed, the T.O.W. pulled a crowd of knowledgeable tug freaks, who knew exactly what they were looking at and were ecstatic at the heat this level of competition generated.
There is an incredible photographic record of the 1900 competition snapped by the great Minsk-based Russian sports photographer, Wolfgang F. Krupskaya. ‘The Wolf’ was the only photographer who actually took photos while representing and pulling in the quest for gold.
In 1900 a mixed Scandinavian team put away a team from France in the final. In 1904 it was a clean sweep to America, in 1908 Britain swept the medals. In 1912 only two teams turned up. The Stockholm Police, great tuggers, took on the thin blue line of the London Police in the final, and the Swedish synchronised pullers were victorious. It was a disappointing turnout as a number of countries entered but failed to appear on the day.
But in 1920 it was a different story. The event captured the public’s imagination. Forty teams from five nations turned up. It was a golden finale to the event, with Great Britain taking the gold, Netherlands the silver and Belgium the bronze. This great crowd-pleaser was dropped due to issues concerning nationalities of teams, betting irregularities and illegal equipment, like studded boots, being used by the pullers.
Not sure what was happening with the T.O.W. scene in Australia during this golden age of Olympic tugging. Records in the sporting archives of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra indicate there was a lively interstate tug-of-war competition from the 1890s that climaxed with a very popular State of Origin, best-of-three pulls staged every July. Origin tugs were dominated by powerful teams including the South Fremantle Winches, the Oxford Street Drag (based in Sydney), and the Southside Slims from th
e Wonthaggi area in Victoria. The interstate pulls drew enormous crowds. On one July night at the Adelaide Oval, when snow fell on Mount Lofty, 57,987 people turned out to see an Origin victory to the Willunga Wrench.
It appears that, unfortunately, the message never got through to the Australian tug-of-war community that the yank and strain was on the Olympic card in that magnificent twenty-year stretch of red-hot competition when this event was considered central to every successful Olympic fortnight.
RUGBY LEAGUE
‘Simply the Best’, the Greatest Game of All. Does anything more need to be said? Hell yeah!
THE GAME OF RUGBY league erupted in the north of England in 1895. A few years later, big slabs of Australia fell under the new code’s charismatic spell.
The game was revolutionary in concept when it broke away from rugby union. The sticking point was money. No surprises there!
The union wanted the players to turn out and cop a whack around the bonce and a boot up the date for free. Ultimately all it offered, apart from life-threatening injuries and a permanent wobbly boot in later life, was unlimited travel options, while the league offered to pay players for roughly the same experience. To the casual observer the main difference was that the league required teams of thirteen players prepared to cop it, not fifteen.
In 1908 the bell rang at Birchgrove Oval and with a loud tinkle the league was underway in the lucky country. The Australian sporting landscape pivoted and was never the same again. NSW-based clubs, there at the dawn of creation, were Glebe, Newtown, Western Suburbs, South Sydney, Balmain, Eastern Suburbs, Newcastle and Cumberland. From these humble beginnings, the league has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry.
The origins of the sport, dubbed the Greatest Game of All (G.G.A.) have been well documented in journals like the now-dead Rugby League Week (The Bible) and The Big League, and ute-loads of books about the G.G.A., including the international sports book of the year in 2019 From Biter to Bubbler: A History of Rugby League Fun by Ray ‘The Penalty Puller’ Bietz. The romance of the game is front and centre in Married at First Sight to a Rugby League Player by Madison F. Bump, I Left the Light On (an intimate personal history of rugby league) by C.A. Carpet, the harrowing, controversial and very funny I Was a Prop in a Winger’s Body! by Andrew ‘The Ferret’ Frizell and Hanging on the Edge (rugby league’s great wingers from 1908 to 2021) by Andrew ‘Lightning’ Bolt.
These great reads capture the history, the excitement and the drama of the code. In the Library of League, top of the top ten is The Book of Feuds, which focuses on the controversial and weirdly frosty relationship between the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Eastern Suburbs Roosters. The Greatest Rabbit, former Gladiator Russell Crowe, reads a chapter or two of The Feuds before every hutch and fowl-house clash. This winds the coachwood-and myrtle–clad Bunnies right up. Russell gets them in the groove ready to run out and savage an uncooked Chook.
These tell-all exposés of the great games, the incredible tries, the injuries requiring the ambulance, the outrageous refereeing howlers, the ridiculous send-offs and the greatest players record the development of the code over ten decades.
What is not stressed in this avalanche of print, which has required the destruction of a rainforest or two, is the simple statement of fact that no sport in the world has a greater redemptive power woven into its DNA than Australian rugby league.
This humble barge-and-charge code makes those masters of reclaiming souls, the Catholic Church, look like amateurs in the spiritual restoration caper. This is why Australians are drawn to the game as players, officials, referees, spectators and punters. Redemption is a simple lark. League lovers witness the odious on-field crimes. They hear the whistle blow. They see the send-off. They hear the penalty handed down by the tribunal Monday night. They see the offenders doing time. Then these evil doers are welcomed back to the game. The remorseful and the rueful are cleansed of all sins. The contrite, in club colours, will be given an even greater welcome if they score under the black dot in the first attacking play of their comeback match.
This humble barge-and-charge code makes those masters of reclaiming souls, the Catholic Church, look like amateurs in the spiritual restoration caper.
Rugby league crime lurks in every eighty minutes. Players exert themselves on the very edge of their physical, mental and spiritual capabilities. The sport involves stretching every fibre, every sinew, every muscle the player has in all directions. And it asks the hard questions of their very soul. That is the code’s great charm.
League is a game of obsessive passion and biblical lust. The head and the heart pull players in opposite directions. They want to do the right thing for the team, but . . .
League is a game of obsessive passion and biblical lust. The head and the heart pull players in opposite directions.
Bloody hell! There is a bloke in the opposition’s jumper coming at me with the ball. I have to hit the clown, so he stays hit! I will whack the Steeden free of that tight grasp. The try line is wide open. I will score. People will love me! Thighs don’t fail me now! But hang on a minute . . . the bloke is my best mate! I went to school with him. Too bad! Whack! Whammo! Kapow!
The plan is executed perfectly. The opposing player is clobbered and put into the half-dream room on the outer reaches of the planet Coosbane, unsure who he is, or where he is, and unable to list any of Cold Chisel’s top ten hits.
Out in the middle the try is called back. The bunker rules the tackle was head high. ‘Thighs don’t fail me now’ is sent off for twenty minutes in the sin bin. The schoolmate is loaded into the back of the ambulance on his way to the nearest hospital.
The clobbered player comes to in a hospital bed with a lot of tubes going in and out. No surprise to see the schoolmate who did the whacking, still in the shorts, jumper and boots, blow in bedside as the first visitor in the intensive care unit. He greets the injured mate with an ice-cold beer and a grin from ear to ear. Never mind that he has to pour the amber nectar down the mate’s bed-ridden throat. That is mateship and that in a nutshell is the enduring beauty and the mad mystique of rugby league.
The bell might have rung in 1908 but the one great league leap forward was the creation of the State of Origin concept in 1980.
The bell might have rung in 1908 but the one great league leap forward was the creation of the State of Origin concept in 1980. It was such a basic idea: the best players from Queensland dolled up in Meninga Maroon should pack down against the best from NSW in Backdoor Benny Elias Blue.
As this novel idea cleared the guttering, the code’s custodians were dragged kicking and screaming to the sideline card table for an interstate parley. Once all parties embraced the idea, they suddenly loved it. They loved the income from the crowds who wanted to be there for every thump, bump and dump, and the rivers of gold that flowed from those all-important and very lucrative television rights. The loot from television came in elephant dollars stacked in the back of the code’s Toyota ute.
The original concept has evolved into a three-verse ode championing world peace through brutality, international harmony through unforgettable violence, and reconciliation through eighty minutes of war with football boots on.
State of Origin has become one of the great rivalries in the World of Sport. It is the pinnacle of the rugby league caper on this planet. It is far more important than weekly home-and-away matches and the annual Grand Final, and wildly more significant than any Test match, in which Australia is matched against a side from the easy-to-beat basket.
The Origin three-pronger has always been an excellent opportunity for branding. Everybody wants a piece of the shirt and short ensemble to carry their company’s name into combat. Historically it has been a Battle of the Brews: XXXX, north of the Tweed, and various beer brands in NSW.
There is plenty of disruption in this interstate tale of tipples. The complex roguery of the Origin beer history requires in-depth PhD research. It does not stop with jumper and shorts. There are on-ground
signage rights and arcane pourage rights (as in what beer can be served while the game is on in the venue and indeed pubs around the country that take the TV coverage). This is all grist to a promotional mill. These beer brouhahas can often end in the courts before a panel of beaks. All of it provides free advertising for those three nights on the Origin calendar.
The great motivating theme of the rumpus was generated before teams from Queensland became part of the National Rugby League competition. In the bad old days, whenever the Queensland v NSW fixture loomed on the agenda, the Sydney-based clubs, which had nicked all the good players north of the Tweed, claimed these champions should now play for NSW. This drove the Maroon-clad, Cane Toad community nuts. All their good players were wearing the colour of their fierce rivals, the blue-rinsed Cockroaches that infested Sydney.
The simple genius at the dawn of State of Origin’s creation was to select teams from the players based on where they began their careers in the junior grades. It did not matter where they played in the home-and-away club competition. This certainly levelled the playing field.
This simplicity was never as simple as it seemed. The brains trust think-tanks in Queensland and NSW endlessly chew the fat over whether a player is actually a Blue or a Maroon. At the dawn of time, players were either Cockroaches or Cane Toads, and proud of it. The system should have provided certainty. But the very simplicity of the system generated long-lasting, arm-wrestling arguments based on disputes about who, what, where, when and how old.
Back in those fogs of time that cloud so much sporting history, mascots dressed as Cane Toads and Cockroaches rampaged up and down the sidelines of early Origin matches. Sideline battles between the mascots were often as entertaining as the on-field struggle for state domination. The grotesque vermin battles were eventually ‘Morteined’ as too many serious fights broke out among the ranks of the rancid, drawing attention away from the league combat happening metres away.
