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| Simon Barnett at his What Now? peak Pic: onfilm.co.nz |
And when I say unfair, I'm not just talking about on the athletes; we also lose out as spectators. Olympic watchers between 1984 and 1996 not only had the privilege of watching Carl Lewis run incredible times on the track, but also got to see him utilize his unique technique to leap to four golds in the long jump. The world record in the long jump (8.95m) as not been broken since 1991 (when Lewis was still competing). And one of the main reasons for this is apparently the relatively lucrative nature of sprinting, which means that the likes of Usain Bolt are not willing to jeopardize their sprinting career by diversifying and potentially risking injury. This is unfortunate, because sports engineers have estimated that Bolt could leap as far as 10.50m in the long jump pit - a quite incredible prediction given how illusive the 9m barrier has proved.
As enthralled as I've been by Bolt at these Games, and as much as I recognize that specialization enables him to do what he does (even if, by his own admission, he is not the hardest trainer in the world), I would love to see him tackle a multi-disciplinary sport. The decathlon would be good but the modern pentathlon would be even better. Can we somehow arrange for ten of the most high profile gold medal winners to take part in a modern pentathlon competition on the last day of the Olympics? You're telling me you wouldn't tune in to watch Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps, Lebron James, Jessica Ennis, Chris Hoy, Ryan Nelsen and Gabrielle Douglas going head to head in fencing, swimming, equestrian, running and shooting? The potential for unintentional comedy is almost untold but the potential to reveal the world's best athlete is even greater.
The idea of some sort of competition to help compare the relative merits of sports people from different codes is nothing new. Down under, Hayden Knowles' Gatorade 100m Bolt famously pitted athletes from Australia's footballing codes against one another in 2010 to see who was the fastest (with rugby's Lachie Turner taking out the title) and New Zealand's charity Fight for Life has appealed to audiences keen to get to the bottom of debates about the respective toughness of league and union players. The pinnacle for me however, has to be the oft-forgotten and regrettably deceased Clash of the Codes.
Criminally, a search of the internet turns up a desperate lack of YouTube footage and little more than a Wikipedia stub for a television show that was amongst the most compelling viewing of my formative years. I still can't hear Italian house sensation Black Box's 1989 hit 'Ride on Time' without reminiscing about tuning in to Simon Barnett (bouncing back from the plane crash of a game show that was Face the Music where he struggled to replicate the classic What Now? years) to hear what challenges the athletes would endure in the next half hour in the battle for sporting supremacy.
In case you were living under a rock during the nineties, the basic premise of the show was teams of three athletes from various sporting codes would compete against each other in a series of physical challenges (most of which, as I recollect, seemed to revolve around Rangitoto in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour). The triathletes were perennial favourites and the netballers always seemed slightly disadvantaged against teams containing at least two males (although most teams did contain at least one female member) but it was Ian Ferguson and the canoeists who came out on top winning both series (in 1994 and 1997).
As a young football (soccer) player growing up in a rugby-mad country, any ammunition that could be gathered in the argument against any sport other than rugby being "wussy" was like gold dust. I may never have touched a kayak in my life but watching the rugby team get beat (and convincingly so) not once, but twice was priceless.
Looking back, the beauty of Clash of the Codes was that it was conceptualised at a time where the seeds of reality TVwere just being planted but, more importantly, professionalism in sport was yet to really catch on (with the exception of a few All Blacks who had crossed the ditch to make their fortune playing league, the bloody traitors). At the start of the first series the Super 12 was still two years away. It's telling that the second series, in 1997, one year after the launch of the Super Rugby era, failed to capture the imagination in the same way and led to the cancellation of the show. It was a simpler, more innocent era where athletes needed the media exposure (and anything they got paid to take part) far more than the media needed them. Professionalism changed all that, and whilst I accept that the quality of sport on offer for mere spectators has improved out of sight as a result (unless you happen to be an Auckland Rugby fan), I think it's important to acknowledge that, at the same time, something has been lost.
Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the whole situation is that at the same time as professionalism has made the recreation of a show like Clash of the Codes highly improbable, if not completely and forever out of reach, reality TV has come on in leaps and bounds. The lessons learned from Big Brother, American Idol, The X Factor, The Voice and any number of other horrific spin offs would only serve to make Clash of the Codes even more glorious. Instead, we'll just have to settle for specialist athletes doing incredible things in just one discipline (and tune in to the Olympic pentathlon every four years).
Unfortunately, I'm not able to let go of this idea just yet. The potential of such a show is just too great. Come back next week to read my column about how the 2012 edition of Clash of the Codes would look, especially if you happen to be a TV exec with an enormous budget and a programming hole to fill!
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