THE UNSUNG HEROES OF SPORT

Ever seen Sepak Takraw? What about ele­phant polo? Or even roller hockey, for that mat­ter? They are all sports (the first is a type of hands-free vol­ley­ball played in south­east Asia, while the sec­ond is polo but on ele­phants in­stead of horses) but they are all sports that you could well go a life­time with­out ever hear­ing about or see­ing, never mind ac­tu­ally play­ing.

It is true that roller hockey is fairly pop­u­lar in this part of Eu­rope, es­pe­cially in Cat­alo­nia, and es­pe­cially around the Penedès area, and there is even a Barça roller hockey team. How­ever, there are also whole swathes of the world where peo­ple would have lit­tle idea of what the game ac­tu­ally looks like.

An alien vis­it­ing Earth could be ex­cused for think­ing that we only have about four sports on the planet, with foot­ball first among them. I some­times won­der whether this is part of the rea­son why some peo­ple roll their eyes at the mere men­tion of foot­ball. Over­ex­po­sure kills in­ter­est and fa­mil­iar­ity breeds con­tempt. What’s more, if you have a menu of three items, what do you do if none of them take your fancy? Who knows if the an­swer to this is hav­ing more sport avail­able rather than less, so that every­one finds some­thing more to their lik­ing? I don’t know. Maybe not.

While it may just be the case that any type of sport – whether it is pole vault­ing or chess box­ing (com­peti­tors do al­ter­nate rounds of each sport) - doesn’t do it for some peo­ple, we can all surely ap­pre­ci­ate ex­cel­lence and cel­e­brate it. Danc­ing has never been my thing, for ex­am­ple. Even though my daugh­ter is a dancer and I’ve sat through scores of her per­for­mances, some­how it just won’t grow on me. But, I will say that I have noth­ing but ad­mi­ra­tion for the ef­fort and skill that dancers put into their art form. I could say the same thing about opera singers or sushi chefs.

The same thing might also be said of the sports peo­ple fea­tured in this issue of the mag­a­zine on pages 20 to 27. You cer­tainly won’t find Leo Messi among the ath­letes we cover in the re­port, but you will find some true cham­pi­ons who have reached the pin­na­cles of their re­spec­tive dis­ci­plines thanks to their sin­gle-minded ded­i­ca­tion and many hours of striv­ing, in short, through their blood, sweat and tears.

And in par­tic­u­lar, for me, the sports­peo­ple that fas­ci­nate me the most tend to be those in mi­nor­ity sports. There are no rich re­wards for these peo­ple, and they will re­main largely anony­mous de­spite their, often great, achieve­ments. When I think of sports he­roes, these are the ones I spare a thought for, the un­sung he­roes of sport. And, as you will see in our fea­tures this month, there are no short­age of such peo­ple in Cat­alo­nia !