FSOM: The burden of carrying a team on your shoulders

The chances are you have never heard of Taisto Miettinen, but he is a sporting household name in Finland.

His record of gold medals won would make Michael Phelps weep with jealousy.

The Finnish Fort Knox has been crowned world champion in Iron Bar Walking, Water Running, Bog Snorkelling, Snowshoe Running and winter swimming.

If you’ve missed coverage of these events on Eurosport (who will show just about any sport, including Jumping to Conclusion, Running off at the Mouth, Garden Chair Stacking and Grass Growing) Fifty Shades will run through them.

Water Running is – well – running through water, while Winter Swimming consists of the ability to swim in the winter months. Not in a nicely heated indoor pool with the Yummy Mummies morning class, but in a stretch of water cleared for the purpose with ice axes or pneumatic drills.

Somewhere along the line, Winter Swimming probably involves being smeared in goose fat, while the incentive for competitors to complete the course in good time is to avoid being encased in ice for posterity like a woolly mammoth.

Bog Snorkelling is a well-established sport, where competitors don snorkels and propel themselves through a peat bog using flipper power alone while Snowshoe Running requires competitors to run. In snowshoes.

A Google search of Iron Bar Walking tends to throw up reports of court cases involving poor saps being brained by a thug wielding an Iron Bar while out Walking the dog, or bizarre reports of guys Walking into a bar and being asked to iron a selection of shirts.

But what our man Miettinen excels at is the sport of Wife Carrying, where he was recently crowned World Champion for the fifth successive year.

Wife Carrying is a well-established sport in Scandinavian countries, where it probably evolved from the sort of party which involved chucking Volvo keys on to the table and hoisting a neighbour’s hot wife on to your shoulders and heading out the back door at a rate of knots, leaving him to contemplate why he is facing an evening of Hide the Sausage with somebody resembling Mrs Jabba the Hutt with a come-hither look on her face.

As a well-established sport, Wife Carrying does have rules. The length and nature of the course is well defined, including dry and water obstacles.

The ‘wife’ must weigh a minimum of 49kgs, but importantly, the carrier does not need to be married to her. This does make the sport’s title of Wife Carrying liable to a visit from the Advertising Standards Authority, but does rule out the need for marriages of convenience.

You can only imagine the divorce petitions – “I married her because she was a slim, 49kgs and gave me a real shot at the title, but it didn’t last. Soon after we got married she started hitting the Smorgasbord and pickled herring really hard and before long, it was like carrying Red Rum on my back, so I’m seeking a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility and a hernia.”

Contestants are able to use a variety of carrying techniques, including piggyback, fireman’s lift, or Estonian Style, where the ‘wife’ wraps her legs around the ‘husband’s’ neck and clings on to his waist. Fifty Shades will leave it to your imagination as to how this technique developed, and why it is called Estonian Style.

It’s at this point that I should point out that I would consider it a pleasure to compete in the Wife Carrying Championships with Mrs Fifty Shades, whose sylph-like figure would be but gossamer and fluff to rest lightly on one’s shoulders.

Now Miettinen and others are willing participants at the World Wife Carrying championships. In other words, they are keen and happy to provide the legwork and power and carry the other half of the team on their backs.

But that is not the case in other sports and as Gareth Bale rushes off to Waterstones for a good Spanish phrase book prior to heading off to Real Madrid he will be relieved that the Weight of the World – AKA, the Spurs’ team – is lifted off his shoulders.

We’ve perhaps never really known how good Bale is as a footballer because for the last two seasons he has played pretty much every game under the handicap of toting the equivalent of Dawn French and her two even chubbier sisters on his back.

At Real, the players around him should relieve him of that sort of burden and without that weight on his shoulders Bale will be as bubbly as a ping-pong ball in your bath tub.

Bale, of course, is not the first player to carry the weight of the team.

Football has always had its Atlases, but they probably divide into two categories – those prepared to carry the weight, and those who have had it thrust upon them.

For years, Matthew Le Tissier lumped around the thumping burden of keeping Southampton in English football’s top flight.

The fact he stayed at The Dell when he had offers to go elsewhere hints he was as happy as a Sherpa carrying a grand piano up to the summit of Everest to take the task on. Incredibly, at no point did anybody find the final straw for this particular camel’s back and he retired with Southampton still in the top flight and safe in the knowledge of a job well done.

Fifty Shades would not dare belittle Le Tissier’s task but carrying a club on your back is small beer compared with bearing a whole nation.

Back in the 1970s Holland loaded Johan Cruyff up like a yak. Although the Dutch threatened to sweep the game aside with their brand of Total Football played by a group of mutli-talented, multi-skilled players who could play anywhere on the pitch – football’s equivalent of Lego – Cruyff was the main load-bearing beam.

Problem was that, having loaded him up, the Dutch found this yak ignored the herder’s whistles and whip and instead of sticking to the path, buggered off to the nearest patch of green grass.

Rinus Michels might have been the Dutch coach but Cruyff – probably Fifty Shades’ favourite player of all time – really ran the train set. He could throw a strop further than Steve Backley could chuck a javelin. This extended to little matters such as pulling the third sleeve stripe off his team’s Adidas sponsored shirt as he had a boot deal with Puma (check out pics of Cruyff in Orange in the 1970s, his shirt is the only one with two stripes).

Cruyff carried Holland to the 1974 World Cup final where the red-hot favourites Oraanje were beaten by the bike-plifering Germans (the reason the Dutch hate Germans so much is because they are still sore that the Wehrmacht requisitioned all their treaders when they came a-calling in 1940).

Holland proved they weren’t solely a one-man team by reaching the final in the 1978 World Cup in Argentina without him. But they would have won it with Cruyff, who cried off long before the tournament, claiming terrorists threatened to kidnap his wife and kids if he played.

Who knew that Diego Maradona is really 7 feet 4inches tall, and was pencilled in for a career in the NBA?

That was before he captained Argentina in the 1986 World Cup.

If ever a sportsman carried his team and the hopes of a nation on his back, it was Maradona.

Argentina would have been average at best without Maradona who performed the sort of physical equation only Sheldon Cooper would be able to explain as he grew while being subjected to increasing weight and pressure.

We boo and hiss at the pantomime villain who scored with his Hand of God, but nobody could deny that he bundled Argentina into a big sack, slung it across his back and carried them to World Cup victory.

It came at a personal price to Maradona and such was the burden of carrying the weight of a house on his back like a snail, that the towering Maradona – originally tall enough to give Peter Crouch a stiff neck looking up at him – was squished into the squat, SpongeBob Squarepants version we are familiar with.

Michel Platini led France to the 1984 European Championships in the days when he was a magnificently effective and elegant midfielder with no pea-brained schemes to improve football cluttering up his brain.

Platini was part of the ‘Magic Square’ in France’s midfield, along with Alain Giresse, Luiz Fernandez and former Fulham boss Jean Tigana.

But he was so good, France would have won it if Platini had Taisto Miettinen carrying his wife, Dawn French and Sheldon Cooper playing alongside him.

Having a tall, elegant, slim midfield maestro to bear a heavy load made a pleasant change for the French who in the past, have looked towards a 19-year-old hallucinogenic girl in Joan of Arc, and a short, dumpy, short-tooled serial-shagger of Italian extraction in Napoleon to carry their hopes.

And it’s not just football that has one-man bands.

Jonny Wilkinson risked spinal cord compaction and bandy legs for the load he carried in the form of the England rugby team.

Time was when Wilkinson was pretty much the sole source of points for an England team who did not possess anyone capable of completing the multi-task of running at a pace slightly faster than Bernard Manning with the scent of a chippy in his nostrils while carrying a large leather egg.

England’s tactics in those days consisted largely of a bunch of forwards similar in appearance to, but only slightly more mobile than Stonehenge, earning enough penalties within Wilkinson’s kicking distance. The exception to this were the rare occasions when the ball would somehow squirt free from the scrum or maul like a piece of wet soap on a kiddies’ bath night, and pop up for Wilkinson to ping a drop-kick between the posts.

Ian Botham earned the nickname Beefy principally because he was an Ox.

Look up the word ‘Ox’ in the dictionary and it will describe a creature imbued with brute strength, able to carry insufferable loads, docile and slow of thought most of the time, but aggressive when roused or upset.

Alongside that accurate description will be a picture of Botham who – while most of his England team-mates legged it like turkeys being asked if they would like to attend a special celebration dinner in late December –  single-handedly gave some of it back to an Australian team that contained bristle-faced badasses like Rod Marsh, Dennis Lillee, Geoff Lawson and Allan Border.

Across the raging, foaming Atlantic, American sport has had its share of sporting Atlases.

Dan Marino hefted the Miami Dolphins around for years, Joe Montana likewise the 49ers.

People criticise Andy Murray for having a face longer than a wet weekend in Teignmouth but is it any surprise?

Fifty Shades is amazed he even has the strength to suck a drink up through a straw after carrying British tennis on his back.

He might have thrown a couple of monkeys off his back by winning the US Open and Wimbledon, but he’s still got the weight of the rest of the zoo on his shoulders. San Diego Zoo, not a petting zoo. And they’ve just enlarged the Elephant House in anticipation of some new arrivals.

So good luck to Gareth Bale, who won’t have to carry the weight of the Real Madrid team on his shoulders.

Just the weight of expectancy a world record transfer fee brings. Perhaps he’ll find things a bit easier if he takes up Wife Carrying, providing his other half isn’t Dawn French.

By John May

Follow @maisy68

This photograph was provided by andybrannan.