Bushell's Best Bits - Everything You Needed To Know About The World's Craziest Sports. Mike Bushell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ hairdryer treatment.

      Then I stepped back with the other hopeful trainers and held my breath for the liberation: the moment when the birds are released. The door to the basket flipped down and for a second, nothing. Then one bird – but not Louise – stepped tentatively into the sunshine. A quick look to the right and to the left, and having given the signal that it was safe to go, the leader was followed into the sky by the whole flock. A sweeping kite of grey and white was swallowed up by the blue and within seconds they were dots above the trees, veering off to the right at incredible speed. The average speed they get up to is 60 miles per hour, but they have been recorded doing 110 mph, with the wind behind them in Australia.

      In reality we would never have made it back to the loft in time to see the even the slower birds finish this five-mile race. It is a sprint for them, a race for the Usain Bolts of the pigeon world. So the birds were released for a second time, and this time, in the race that mattered, I waited the whole time at the finish. I got the call to say they were on their way. Silence descended over the loft as we anxiously watched the skies.

      Within minutes of them taking off, they suddenly came into view, a flying carpet of feathers circling the trees, getting lower and lower before a group of them started to descend towards the loft. Cries of ‘come on!’ had punctured the vacuum. ‘That’s it, Louise!’ – I joined the clamour, pretending that I could tell she was in the breakaway group.

      She was, as it happened, but this is where it can be interesting, and where your skills as a trainer are really tested. The pigeon has to cross the line and actually enter the loft if it’s to claim the prize. Yet Louise decided to rest on top of her home along with three others. They were sunbathing, having arrived in the leading group. This can happen, even after they’ve travelled hundreds of miles, and races can be lost and won in these few critical moments. £20,000 can be gone in an instant and so trainers like Jeremy rattle buckets and use whistle and voice commands to coax their birds over the final few inches. This is where experience counts and I didn’t have any. My calls to Louise just seemed to vex her. She eventually followed in ninth. Even though I had followed the advice and not fed her before the race, she still had no sense of urgency when it mattered.

      I had seen what a lottery this sport can be, with a twist at the end that you don’t get in any other sport. Imagine Frankel stopping to eat some grass or to admire the view a couple of lengths from the winning post. Punters would be tearing their hats into pieces.

      It can even happen in the biggest race in the world, the Million Dollar race in Sun City in South Africa. As the name suggests, one million dollars is given to the winner. In some parts of the world like China where the sport has really taken off, some birds have sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. In Europe the highest price paid was €300,000. The sport has become big business and yet for a tenner, anyone of us can still get involved.

      For more information of the sport and if you want to join Her Majesty the Queen and become the owner of a racing pigeon (Her Royal Highness has a loft at Sandringham) then visit the website of the RPRA at www.rpra.org

      What’s more if you find a stray pigeon in the garden with a ring around its leg, it will be a racing one. It may be resting, but if it stays and looks lost, then get in touch with the RPRA via the website or via twitter on @pigeonracinguk and they can find its owner.

      That’s it for this chapter on our sporting animal friends, but bigger creatures also feature later in the book when we focus on unusual sports from around the world.

       2

       A FAMILY AFFAIR

      These are sports which bring families together: to get all of us playing and to make sport more inclusive. Many of the activities featured have been created since I started my Saturday series and some have been invented by crossing two existing sports together. If you want to know how to play the love child of rugby and golf, read on. Others may be more traditional activities which are great for all ages, and these are the sports I have picked out which I found to be most family-friendly.

      A NEW SPORT IS BORN

      Strange noises were coming from the barn. A whirring, a bang, a thwack – and then silence. The door creaked open and a man in brown overalls, with hair styled by shock, stumbled into the sunshine, blowing at his hands, as the last flicker of flame retreated into his gloves. His face was speckled with the charcoal, sweat and toil that you might associate with his work as a blacksmith, but there were no horses today. A broad grin beamed through the vanishing smoke: it was more than just a smile of satisfaction that the fire was out.

      This grin quickly realised its ambition to be a smile, and was then knighted into unbridled euphoria. For this was a eureka moment that could make this man’s family life bearable again. He reached back into the barn to fetch a wooden ball, a four-pronged metal arch and a giant wooden hammer. This was his new baby, and it is what happens when sports are crossbred in a workshop. I have come across countless examples of these hybrids.

      NET RUGBY

      It was originally known as rugby netball and was founded in the late 1800s as a way to keep troops returning from the Boer war out of the pubs. It started on Clapham Common in South London and in its heyday in the 1920s there were dozens of teams playing in several leagues. It’s now staging a comeback on the common with the return of a league, and a World Cup competition, held every summer. It’s simple to play. Think of the flowing teamwork you get in football, but you can pick the ball up and run with it as well.

      You don’t need to worry about forward passes. They are allowed, but so are full rugby-style tackles, so the game won’t stop for a foul. The final sport to throw into the mix is netball, because to score you have to throw or drop-kick the ball into huge nets hung on posts at each end of the grassy field. It’s proved a useful way for rugby players to keep fit during the summer, and Junior – who played at the time for London Welsh – was keen to show me how physical it could be when I had a go, lifting me off my feet in a challenge when I was running in on goal. It’s a wonder I didn’t end up in the net myself. What struck me was how this sport is great for all round fitness. There were very few stoppages, so the action was non-stop which is why we needed rolling subs.

      To get involved try www.netrugby.org

      CANOE POLO

      This crosses the paddling skills of canoeing with the ball handling skills of water polo and basketball. If you have a wicked streak in you, this could be the sport to bring it out, because the quickest way to clear your route to goal is to turn your opponent’s boat over! You have two giant nets hung on poles two metres above the water at each end of a pool or outside water course. There are two teams of five players racing up and down trying to score from their canoes. It’s a contact team game in which tactics and positional play are as important as the fitness and speed of the individual athletes, and it helps promote canoeing in a different environment.

      Early records show a variety of canoe ball games being played in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, but these were more novelty games played for fun. It wasn’t until the 1920s in France and Germany that canoe ball games were first used in earnest to build up river skills and to get more people into the boats.

      At the time it was difficult to attract new paddlers and spectators and this provided an exciting introduction to canoeing. It was contained and safer, and so in СКАЧАТЬ