keep on running

A couple of follow-up items to the last post, which was getting a bit long anyway:

My general running career outside of parkrunning comprises a very small number of other events, spread over a large number of years. Most significantly, I ran two half-marathons in the space of about six months back in 2004 and 2005. As always, for someone who doesn't just naturally love running, as some maniacs appear to do, the interesting question here is one of motivation, and I think a couple of friends hatched the idea and I signed up in a brief spasm of enthusiasm, far enough away from the actual date that it didn't quite seem real. 

Of course it does eventually start to seem real, and among some of the endless slogging around the Downs on training runs I did compete in a couple of 10-kilometre races as a warm up: the Nailsea 10K which I remember being intermittently hilly but which I smashed round in 51:38, and the Frampton Cotterell 10K which I recall finding much more difficult despite it being flatter and which I ran in a slower (though still perfectly respectable in hindsight) 52:59.

The actual Bristol half-marathon was on a day of slightly odd weather - warm intervals broken up by one torrential downpour on the long out-and-back stretch along the Portway. I was suffering quite a bit by the end but managed to muster enough of a sprint finish to duck under the two-hour mark at 1:59:45.

I can't really remember what motivated me to then sign up for the Bath half-marathon in 2005 - presumably the desire to prove to myself that I could do a faster time than the first one. The main thing I remember was that the preparatory training regime was a lot tougher, since the training period was in the winter rather than the summer as it had been for Bristol (the actual races being in spring and autumn respectively) and entailed a lot of running in the dark. Anyway, I shaved just over a minute off my Bristol time at 1:58:40 and promptly retired from long-distance running.

That was basically it, 5K parkruns aside, until 2018 when Hazel suggested doing a challenge and came up with the Newport 10K. So we did that, and then discovered that a couple of friends had signed up for the Cardiff 10K, so we did that one as well. I ran a perfectly decent 55:08 for Newport and a slightly less impressive 58:04 at Cardiff, which I recall being very congested at the start and a much hotter day.

Finally, a few notes on parkrun courses I have run at, for the benefit of anyone thinking of having a go. Numbers in brackets are the number of times I've run there (as of today):

• Newport (18): At Tredegar House, mostly off-road, a couple of possible course layouts depending on season, weather and other things going on in the grounds, but all incorporating the section through the woods round the back of the artificial lake which can be quite muddy.
• Riverfront (17): Fast, flat, out-and-back course along the Usk in the town centre. Downstream and therefore slightly downhill on the way out, upstream and therefore slightly uphill on the way back but still a good one for a PB. As with any out-and-back course you have to be wary of runners (especially the super-speedy guys at the front) coming back the other way.
• Rogiet (7): at Rogiet Countryside Park, 3 laps, mostly flat but for one up-and-down hump at the far end of the course. Occasionally frequented by quiz maestro and possible canal-based murderer CJ de Mooi.
• Cwmbran (2): Occasional re-routings but usually starts by the boating lake and incorporates at least one lap of it. Fast and flat in the dry, off-road sections sometimes slippery and treacherous at other times. Ends by an ice-cream shop, though, which is nice.
• Wycombe Rye (1): Covered elsewhere but mostly flat, varied surfaces including grass at start and finish, bizarre little mini-section in the middle where you have to run up a series of steps in a wooded area and down again the other side.
• Severn Bridge (1): Out-and-back across the old Severn Bridge. As with most long-span bridges it's less flat than you might imagine; the turn-around point is just past the halfway point of the bridge so it's mostly uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back (i.e. the reverse of Riverfront).
• Meadowmill (1): Near Prestonpans, a few miles east of Edinburgh. Bagged on our Scottish holiday in the summer. Generally just a couple of laps of a field by a leisure centre with an odd little narrow out-and-back section to the back of Prestonpans railway station. 
• Tremorfa (1): Over on the east side of Cardiff, next to a giant Tesco which provides handy parking. Flat, fast, three-lap figure-of-eight course which I'd have been hoping for a decent time at had I not been struggling with a miserable cold. But it was the only available weekend so the challenge must take precedence. 
• Belvoir Castle (1): Off-road, out-and-back course near the entrance to the castle. Hilly. Downhill sections delightful (though you need to watch your footing), uphill ones, to quote myself, a bit of a bitch. 
• Llanfoist Crossing (1): New one (started in November) just round the corner from where my parents live. Mostly on an old railway line but nonetheless noticeably uphill on the way out and downhill on the way back, and with a little detour into a grassy park around the halfway point which can be slippery and involves a steepish hill to get back onto the main route. 

running joke

I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but one that I did make at the start of 2024 (pretty much the only serious one I've ever made, actually, thinking about it) was to get out to the parkrun a bit more often, and since "a bit more often" is unacceptably woolly and just invites weaselling out or retrospective redefinition of the challenge to accommodate laziness, I made it a bit more specific: at least one parkrun every calendar month during 2024. So that means every month of the year has to include a parkrun, no skipping March and doing two in April, for instance; that doesn't count. 

I am a tedious evangelist for parkrun as a thing - all you have to do is register, save your membership barcode in some form (this used to mean some physical format but as of recently includes just having it saved on your phone), turn up, and run five kilometres (a smidge over three miles). That's it; all the timing and collating of results is done for you, including collection and analysis of your own personal stats. It's great, and for the reluctant runner (something I would definitely class myself as) provides just enough structure and accountability to encourage participation while not making the bar to entry too high. Running with a large group of other people of extremely mixed abilities has advantages as well; some find the whole community spirit and post-run chat and coffee thing delightful, while some (like me) don't really go for that but find it helpful and motivating to run in a group including lots of other people who are not conspicuously thinner and fitter than them but who are nonetheless not succumbing to the temptation to walk for a bit or just jack the whole thing in and slope off for a pint and a fag.

My brief parkrun history is as follows: I became aware of it back in the early noughties when some friends from Newbury started going regularly to the Greenham Common one and (as people tend to do) evangelising their ass off about it to all and sundry. No disrespect intended to those people, but I looked at them and thought, well, I could probably do that. This was around the time that parkrun (which started in late 2004 in Bushy Park in west London but only added a handful of events in its early years) really started to take off, and my first one was at Tredegar House (which bagged the Newport parkrun name as it was the first in the area in 2011) in March 2013, at which I ran a perfectly respectable 28:58 (that's me approaching the finish line on the right). I did another in May of that year and then took a brief sabbatical for around five and a half years before doing my next one at Riverfront in central Newport (which had started up in 2017) in September 2018. 

That pattern of occasional dabblings continued until early 2020 when Nia, who'd been a reasonably regular participant at the junior parkrun (two kilometres) decided that she'd like to upgrade to the adult version. We did a couple, the second of which in March 2020 turned out to be the last one before the COVID lockdown regulations prevented large groups of people getting together to breathe heavily and sweat over each other for around eighteen months. We participated in the first one back at Riverfront in August 2021 (and got our picture in the paper!) by which time it was clearly evident to me that I was on borrowed time in terms of finishing in front of Nia, or even keeping up with her for any length of time. 

Even after that participation was a bit patchy, though - having done three in the remainder of 2021 and an excellent nine in the first seven months of 2022 I then did none in the rest of 2022 and not a single one in 2023, for reasons I have no recollection of and therefore must just have been apathy. And so by the end of that year I obviously felt that some structure needed to be imposed.

Anyway, long story short, having done a total of eighteen parkruns up to the start of 2024 I fulfilled the terms of the challenge by doing fourteen in 2024 - double-up months were the nice friendly summer months of June and August, the second one in August being my first proper bit of parkrun tourism as we went to Wycombe Rye and had a minor celebrity encounter as described here. In renewing the challenge for 2025 I added a couple of optional stretch objectives: do more parkruns in total than in 2024, and have a crack at getting to fifty in total by the end of the year. That second one would entail doing eighteen during the year, something I'm here to tell you I achieved by running the new Llanfoist Crossing parkrun in early December. I'm slightly reluctant to make a big thing of it, although it's significant to me, as I personally know people whose tally stands at well over a hundred and the guy I spent most of the December parkrun behind (though I'd like it noted that I had him in the sprint finish) was wearing a 250 T-shirt, and I have seen a few 500s at other parkruns. 

I fully intend to renew the basic one-per-month resolution for 2026, though I'm not sure exceeding eighteen for the year is realistic. 

A few random observations to finish:

• My personal best progression is a bit of an odd one: while some people spend years nibbling off a few seconds here and there I set a target of 26:11 at my first ever Riverfront parkrun in 2018 and didn't improve on it until May 2025 when I ran 25:44. Not wanting to have that stand for another seven years I subsequently lowered it again to its current mark of 25:29 (at Riverfront again) in August.
• The watershed of Nia's PB being faster than mine was crossed in September 2024 when she ran 26:05 at Riverfront and she has remained ahead since (and I'm sure will permanently). Her current PB stands at just over a minute faster than mine at 24:36.
• You'll notice that Riverfront seems to be a PB-friendly course, and so it is. This is highly dependent on gradient and terrain, and Riverfront is pretty flat and on tarmac all the way. The one at Tredegar House, by contrast, is mostly flat but there are roots and rocks and mud to cope with so it's never as fast. The hilliest one I have done is at Belvoir Castle up in Leicestershire. 

criclebrity lookeylikey of the day

Here's a timely one with the Ashes series in Australia about to kick off (tonight, in fact) and all England supporters filled with a mixture of trepidation (the last three Australian Ashes series have finished 5-0, 4-0, 4-0 in Australia's favour) and that most crippling and corrosive of all emotions, hope. I suppose a good start would be the series not being effectively over after the very first ball as it was last time. 

Anyway, here's England's unexpected nemesis from last time Scott Boland and actor Wes Bentley, one of the breakout stars of the multi-Oscar-winning American Beauty, a film which seems to have had a sharp (and probably partly Spacey-related) drop-off in critical regard in the last couple of decades but which I recall seeing a couple of times and quite enjoying, while noting that it seemed to think itself slightly cleverer and deeper than it probably actually was. One odd thing about it, though, is that all three of the young actors who were shot to stardom after playing major roles - Bentley, Thora Birch and Mena Suvari - have, while continuing to work in films, receded into relative obscurity since and not become the major stars that everyone predicted they would be. Bentley seems to have navigated the standard actorly route of sudden colossal stardom -> drug addiction, extreme mental derangement -> sobriety, return to regular film work prototyped by Robert Downey jr. among others. The only thing I'm aware of having seen him in since American Beauty is the remake of Pete's Dragon which also starred Robert Redford.

I'm not going to do a separate post for it, but we haven't done an "incidental music spot of the day" for a while so I will just draw your attention to the trailer linked above making use of Baba O'Riley by The Who, a song which has featured here before, back in 2007. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Seen on Facebook this week, this short video inviting "wrong answers only" to the question of who the mystery golfer is. There's limited fun in this, as his identity is revealed in the caption at the bottom, but I do have a suggestion. So here's Swedish golfer Jesper Parnevik (for it is he, sporting a moustache and bouffant hairdo combo that he didn't have during his prime playing days of the late 1990s and early 2000s) and American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

I've no idea of the date of the footage; I don't want to assume it's recent just because the algorithm threw it into my timeline in the last couple of days. All I can tell you is that Parnevik didn't have the 'tache/'fro combo when he bagged his only PGA Champions Tour victory in 2016, so it's probably more recent than that. He doesn't play much these days.

Anyway, both of these guys have featured on this blog before: Vonnegut twice as a book featuree (Cat's Cradle and The Sirens Of Titan) and prior to both of those on the occasion of his death in April 2007, and Parnevik in the course of a throwaway aside at the end of this post about Ayers Rock/Uluru in late 2019. Parnevik also continues the strong tradition of golfers featuring in this category, as evidenced most recently just a couple of months ago. 

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I've got two for you today, which it seems to me fall into the categories, respectively, Fairly Commonplace and Incredibly Niche, although that is of course partly a matter of perspective.

Firstly, JJ Spaun, this year's US Open champion and unwitting instigator of incredibly laboured punnery (see below), and Jeffrey Wright, fine actor with a wide and varied body of work but pictured here as James Bond's CIA buddy Felix Leiter, solely because while playing this role he happened to have roughly the right sort of beard. 

finally - FINALLY! - after a couple of near-misses, I get to do the YOU SPAUNY GET joke. holing a 64-foot putt for it (with the caveat that he did have a spare one if he'd needed it) makes it even more perfect #golf #USOpen https://t.co/vbe07yEf1l

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 16, 2025

I try not to get in my own way too much with a lot of self-analysis once my brain has popped one of these unbidden into my head, but of course when people of colour are involved you have to ask yourself: am I, even entirely subconsciously, Doing A Racism here? I think there are two answers to that: the first one is, well, I can't possibly know for sure, so probably best not to worry about it, and the second is that I'm pretty confident a jury would not convict me of this pair being the most tenuous and squint-requiring supposed resemblance on this blog. Even applying the incredibly restrictive condition of only considering US Open golf champions I think most people would agree that the Lucas Glover one was more obscure. The Webb Simpson one was pretty good, though, although technically he wasn't a US Open champion at the time of the post.

Secondly, American stand-up comic - well, not exactly stand-up, as you'll see if you follow the link - Fiona Cauley and wild warrior woman Ygritte from the TV series Game Of Thrones, as played by Rose Leslie. I should point out that I have never watched an episode of Game Of Thrones, or, as Stewart Lee would have us call it, Peter Stringfellow's Lord Of The Rings. This is partly because I just don't watch TV very much, partly because there's just SO MANY SEASONS of it to get through, and partly because it's firmly in swords and sorcery and Things Of Power fantasy territory, something that doesn't really do it for me, tits notwithstanding. I really am only aware of either Fiona Cauley or Ygritte because some ill-judged clicking on some short videos a while back has unleashed the fearsome power of the Facebook/YouTube algorithm on me and now I get an unavoidable steady diet of stand-up comedy and Game Of Thrones clips presented in my feed, during the course of which I happened to see these two people in quickish succession.

caught in the middle of a hundred and five

You might recall, if you're inclined to notice obscure cricketing milestones, some headlines a few years back about England's Joe Root scoring a hundred in his hundredth Test match. He was the ninth batsman to achieve the feat, and the first to turn such a century into a double-century. His innings of 218 remains the highest by a batsman in his hundredth Test, although Australia's David Warner emulated the feat of scoring a double-century when he became the tenth and most recent member of the club in 2022. The graphic below was produced by Cricinfo when Root joined the club in 2021.

There are, at the time of writing, 78 cricketers who have played at least 100 Test matches (Colin Cowdrey was the first to reach the milestone in 1968 and marked it by scoring 104), and by my rough calculation only around 20 of them have been primarily bowlers, which means there are roughly three times as many batsmen as bowlers on that list. That seems unsurprising, as bowling is a much more physically demanding activity than batting.

One bowler who has recently joined the list is Australia's Mitchell Starc, whose 100th Test came against the West Indies in Kingston in July, and was marked by Starc returning the remarkable figures of 6 for 9 in West Indies' second innings. That prompted me to think: since a 5-wicket haul is (roughly) the bowling equivalent of a century, how many bowlers have done that in their 100th Test match? I've done some slightly half-arsed research and I think I have the data below. It's a much smaller list than for the batsmen, but worthy of note I think.

Bowler	Country	Opposition	When	Figures
Shane Warne	Australia	South Africa	March 2002	6-161
Muttiah Muralitharan	Sri Lanka	Bangladesh	February 2006	6-54
Ravichandran Ashwin	India	England	March 2024	5-77
Mitchell Starc	Australia	West Indies	July 2025	6-9

Starc, as you can see, is the first proper fast bowler to perform the feat, the other three being spinners. 

we'll tear your sole apart

Time for a deep dive into the world of shoes; my shoes in particular. I have no authority to speak for or about anyone else's shoes, nor would I be so presumptuous as to seek to do so. But I am conscious that I have in the past marked the passing of certain items of footwear, in particular shoes dedicated to the specific pursuits of running and walking, and by walking I suppose I sort of mean mountain hiking, rather than just going down the shops; you can pretty much wear any shoes for that, after all.

So I see that I commemorated the passing of my old Saucony running shoes in favour of a fairly cheapo pair of Crane-branded ones from Aldi; at some point after that I upgraded those to a pair of blue Nikes for running purposes, probably around the time I decided to have another crack at getting into doing parkruns in 2018. Those did me for a while but earlier this year I decided it was time to invest in another pair. Now at some point between about 2018 and 2025 there's been a revolution in the world of running shoes whereby every pair you can buy now has these absurdly thick bouncy soles. This has caused some controversy among elite athletes who could suddenly complete entire marathons in a single bound and some restrictions have had to be applied. The pair of Asics shoes I eventually bought are by no means the most extreme example but, as you can see from the photo, are much thicker than the old wafer-thin Nikes, though of course these have had to endure the best part of a decade of being pounded flat by my gargantuan weight. I should add that the new ones are also absurdly comfortable and forgiving of my elephantine running style and certainly reduce the impact of my clumsy lumberings so that I can now hear my music over the deafening thwacking of my feet on the pavement. As a data point I haven't broken the world marathon record or anything while wearing them but I have recently slightly lowered my long-standing parkrun PB. More tedious parkrun evangelism and nerdy stattery in a later post.

You might also recall the progression of my walking shoes from the old Salomons, which bit the dust after a soggy visit to Pembrokeshire in 2010, through the brown Tevas (which are probably still my favourite pair of walking shoes of all the various ones I have ever owned), to the blue Karrimor pair I bought in late 2016. That pair were first-choice walking shoes for only a relatively short space of time as they weren't all that good and were replaced by a pair of grey Mammut shoes I got in Go Outdoors in what was probably around 2018. I can narrow the date down in this way because while I'm still in the Karrimors in this photo at the top of Pen y Fan in June 2018, I'm in the Mammuts in the following photo of me atop Striding Edge in the Lake District in April 2019.

But eventually the Mammuts too became a victim of their own success, by which I mean they were so comfortable they ended up getting worn all the time, and needed replacing, which they have now been by this splendid pair of North Ridge shoes, also purchased from the excellent people at Go Outdoors only a few days ago. You will notice, though, that the super-thick and bouncy soles thing has now extended to walking shoes as well. 

Note also that I still possess both the blue Karrimors, which are very much relegated to mowing the lawn and other gardening activities these days, and my pair of grey Tevas which I bought as a backup for the brown pair, never liked or wore quite as much, and which a couple of decades later the soles are starting to fall off. What will happen now is that the Mammuts will be relegated to general odd-job shoes and the Karrimors and Tevas will be relegated to, erm, the bin. The ciiiiircle of liiiife, etc. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Special recently deceased sporting celebrity slash dreadful 1980s music throwback edition today, as we see recently deceased former Olympic shot putter, World's Strongest Man and budgie enthusiast Geoff Capes face off against Joe Fagin, singer of various songs soundtracking the hit TV series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (a show I should say I have never seen even a single minute of) one of which, That's Livin' Alright, gave him his solitary chart hit in early 1984. 

Despite the one-off nature of this brush with the charts, Fagin had the barefaced chutzpah to entitle his 1996 compilation album All The Hits Plus More. The cover images available on the internet for his earlier album Time Is A Thief reveal an amusing typo in the title of the song Love Hangs By A Thread which puts a whole new Berlin leather bar spin on it:

celebrity deathylikey of the day

The large number of photographs of Italian footballer Salvatore "Toto" Schillaci on the internet this week, in the aftermath of his death aged 59, prompted me to notice that he looked a bit (to me, as always, just to pre-empt any "no he doesn't" nonsense) like comedian Geoff Norcott.

Schillaci was one of those sportspeople who, rather than having a long and glorious career, flowered briefly and gloriously and then didn't do much else - Bob Massie rather than Glenn McGrath, say, or Vinod Kambli rather than Sachin Tendulkar. Seven of his sixteen international caps, and six of his seven international goals, came during the 1990 World Cup where he won the Golden Boot, although, oddly, it was known as the Golden Shoe at the time. 

Geoff Norcott's USP seems to be that he is a rare "right-wing" comedian in a profession dominated by instinctively left-leaning people. Personally I'm not convinced these terms have a great deal of meaning, and certainly if you watch Norcott's stand-up routines he comes across as a fairly engaging blokey sort of bloke, rather than, say, Hitler. 

sorry, I'm feeling a little horse

I was entertained for a couple of hours on Twitter (on X, if you musk, I mean must) yesterday by some increasingly lurid speculation about what a woman named Charlotte Dujardin had done to a horse in a video that had been submitted to, and was under investigation by, some central authority governing equestrian sport and moreover was of a serious enough nature for her to immediately withdraw from the upcoming Paris Olympics.

A bit of background for the non-horse-adjacent such as myself: Charlotte Dujardin is a prominent equestrian sportswoman in the somewhat esoteric field of dressage who also happens to be the joint-most-bemedalled British female Olympian of all time. You might, as I very definitely already have done, make a relative value judgment about the lung-busting athletic prowess of cyclist Laura Kenny (the other joint record-holder) and someone making a horse walk sideways and do a bit of skipping, but that's what the record books show.

Anyway, the incriminating video, despite what internet speculation might have had you believe (i.e. some sort of Catherine the Great thing), contains some footage of Dujardin getting a bit enthusiastic with a whip while training a horse in an indoor training ring. No doubt there are acceptable guidelines for how hard and often you're allowed to hit a horse with a whip, both in official competition and elsewhere, and I have no reason not to believe those who say Dujardin is exceeding them here, but I do also wonder how people think horses get trained to do the weird stylised movements that dressage requires. I mean, it'd be lovely if you could get them into a meeting room and go through all this stuff on a whiteboard as if you were discussing football tactics, but horses are - and I'm aware there might be people outraged at this statement - EXTREMELY DIM and you've got to do things in a more basic way.

I was reminded here of the furore in 2021 around the widely-circulated photograph of Irish racehorse trainer Gordon Elliott sitting on a dead horse while making a phone call. I could have understood a degree of outrage if he had subsequently been revealed to have strangled the horse to death with his bare hands, but no, it had just (as far as I can gather) dropped dead while out on a training gallop. Again, those seemingly outraged that the death of horses might be seen as a relatively normal day-to-day thing in the multi-million-pound horse-racing industry seemed to be ignoring some fairly obvious realities which I had a go at articulating at the time.

Back to the current controversy - you will be unsurprised to learn that someone has already been and made sure that Dujardin's Wikipedia page has been updated with a sober and objective summary of the current situation.

Some of the material that made its way onto the internet during the initial excitement contained some links to Horse & Hound, the publication of choice for the Barbour-jacket and shooting-stick set. While I was there I was offered a couple of other links, one of which was to this story:

Just to be clear, in the equestrian community "sheath" is the euphemism of choice for "cock", so this, just to be even clearer, is an interview with a woman whose job it is to prise lumps of hardened knobcheese out of the ends of horses' cocks. I mean, someone's got to do it, I suppose. Nothing I could say here will be better than just letting the article speak for itself, so here you go:

This is just about perfect; my only complaint is that Horse & Hound weren't tempted to borrow the Daily Mail's usage habits and make occasional references to HIS ENORMOUS HORSEHOOD or something similar.

Note also that specialist horse knob cleaning products are available, including this one which tries (unsuccessfully) to put a slightly cutesy spin on the whole business. 

schauffele schauffele catchy python

You'll recall I made some scornful references to my general disinclination towards "checking exhaustively" and the like in my post about the Scheffler/Schauffele distribution of the first two majors of the golfing year. Well, my interest was further piqued by Bryson DeChambeau winning the US Open in June, and then further piqued by Xander Schauffele winning the Open at Troon just the other day. More specifically, what I mean by that is: it's not difficult to notice that the name DeChambeau shares quite a few letters with Schauffele, and then to pose the more general question: what's the maximum number of letters that the four major winners in a particular year have shared? 

This is one that is going to require checking exhaustively, and manually doing the legwork would be extremely tedious even for an enthusiast of data-related nerdery like myself. So I plunged off down a different alley, still squarely located within the general Nerd Central district, extracted the relevant data from Wikipedia, massaged it into shape a bit, and then wrote a Python program to do the relevant comparisons for me. 

The results are in the table below. These are the years when there was at least one letter common to all four major winners; implicitly it only includes years when all four majors were held, so nothing pre-1934 (when the first Masters tournament was held), a few missing years during World War II, and no 2020 (when the Open was cancelled). Also, we're only considering surnames here, and I've trimmed the occasional "jr." and "III" off the end of surnames where that made the comparison problematic or challenged my rudimentary Python skills.

Of the 84 "full" years, 29 appear in the list below, and only ten have more than one letter in the matching list. Perhaps slightly surprisingly, the two years (1953 and 2000) where a single player won three out of the four majors only have a single match each, Walter Burkemo and Vijay Singh spoiling the party for Ben Hogan and Tiger Woods respectively. Anyway, the main headline here is that of those ten, nine have two letters in the matching list and only one, this very year of Our Lord 2024, has a whopping four to put it well out in front. Obviously a whole year of people with absurdly long and letter-rich surnames helps. 

Year	Matches	Who
1935	r	Perry, Parks, Revolta, Sarazen
1948	on	Cotton, Hogan, Hogan, Harmon
1949	e	Locke, Middlecoff, Snead, Snead
1951	an	Faulkner, Hogan, Snead, Hogan
1953	o	Hogan, Hogan, Burkemo, Hogan
1960	e	Nagle, Palmer, Hebert, Palmer
1961	er	Palmer, Littler, Barber, Player
1962	al	Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, Palmer
1963	s	Charles, Boros, Nicklaus, Nicklaus
1970	c	Nicklaus, Jacklin, Stockton, Casper
1974	r	Player, Irwin, Trevino, Player
1975	a	Watson, Graham, Nicklaus, Nicklaus
1977	n	Watson, Green, Wadkins, Watson
1979	r	Ballesteros, Irwin, Graham, Zoeller
1980	as	Watson, Nicklaus, Nicklaus, Ballesteros
1983	so	Watson, Nelson, Sutton, Ballesteros
1984	er	Ballesteros, Zoeller, Trevino, Crenshaw
1989	a	Calcavecchia, Strange, Stewart, Faldo
1991	a	Baker-Finch, Stewart, Daly, Woosnam
1993	na	Norman, Janzen, Azinger, Langer
2000	s	Woods, Woods, Woods, Singh
2004	n	Hamilton, Goosen, Singh, Mickelson
2006	o	Woods, Ogilvy, Woods, Mickelson
2010	e	Oosthuizen, McDowell, Kaymer, Mickelson
2011	lr	Clarke, McIlroy, Bradley, Schwartzel
2019	o	Lowry, Woodland, Koepka, Woods
2021	m	Morikawa, Rahm, Mickelson, Matsuyama
2023	a	Harman, Clark, Koepka, Rahm
2024	chee	Schauffele, DeChambeau, Schauffele, Scheffler

lookeylikey slash headline of the day

Is it just me who has trouble parsing this headline I saw the other day?

OK, so let's start at the beginning: "I'm a Wimbledon champion marrying fan" - well, OK so you're a fan; I might have hyphenated "Wimbledon champion-marrying" or even "Wimbledon-champion-marrying" just to make it clearer, but let's carry on ... wait, now the rest of the sentence doesn't make sense.

Back up all the way to the beginning and it becomes clear that the starting "I'm" relates to "champion" rather than "fan", and that it was the fan who stopped the champion for a selfie. It didn't help that I initially read "help run tennis" as "help ruin tennis", but that's the fault of my appalling age-related vision deterioration, not the headline writers. 

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that assuming "fan" to be the subject of the first line is the more natural reading. It would really only have taken the addition of an "a" before "fan" to flip the default reading around, though. I'm not sure whether this is more properly classified as a garden-path sentence or a noun pile-up, or maybe even a crash blossom.

Anyway, the actual story relates to 2017 Wimbledon champion Garbiñe Muguruza, the only player to defeat each of the Williams sisters in Grand Slam finals, and, and I hesitate to say this these days for fear of being LITERALLY CANCELLED, possessor of a very lovely pair of legs. The guy she was accosted by for a selfie in New York just happens to be a top model who was working for Tom Ford at the time, just in case you want to calculate your chances of being able to successfully pull off a similar manoeuvre on the top tennis star of your choice without getting your ass tased and ending up with an ASBO.

Impossible to comment on women's tennis in any way without sounding like a colossal sex pervert. #Wimbledon2014

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 28, 2014

Anyway. it also struck me while looking through some photos of Muguruza for, hem hem, "research purposes" that she looks a bit like Imogen Heap, who I see I used the phrase "strange equine beauty" in connection with here, and also compared with Ronni Ancona. I actually think the Muguruza-Heap resemblance is closer, but I include all three anyway; make up your own mind.

celebrity lookeylikeys of the day

I have two for you today - now in theory I could parlay that into two posts in a pathetic and transparent bid to bump the blog stats up, post frequency and aggregate numbers not being what they once were back in the pre-marriage, pre-kids glory glory days of 2008, but you know and I know that that would be a shameful and hollow sham and a travesty and I respect you (yes, even you) too much to do it.

So here's Dan Hartman, successful songwriter of the 1970s and 1980s and occasional solo artist in his own right (1985's I Can Dream About You is probably the one you remember if you're of a similar age to me), and Kim Hughes, Australian batsman of the late 1970s and early 1980s, most remembered - rather unjustly - for his luckless stint as captain during the 1981 Ashes series when he was on the wrong end of Ian Botham's various legendary deeds, and for resigning the captaincy in a tearful hot mess in 1984. 

Secondly, Huwie recently got Neil Gaiman's Pirate Stew out of the library, and among Chris Riddell's many splendid illustrations of the motley piratical crew is this flamboyant chap, who, I'm sure you'll agree, closely resembles Dave Navarro, guitarist with Jane's Addiction since their formation in the mid-1980s and with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers for quite LIDDERALLY One Hot Minute in the mid-1990s. 

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Red Bull Formula 1 head honcho Christian Horner, currently *cough* in the midst of some, erm, personal issues, and Scottish comedian and internet provocateur Limmy, whose current incarnation as a video game streamer on Twitch I find somewhat baffling but which clearly makes him happy and pays the bills, so it's all good. The longer-form TV stuff he used to do is pretty good, and the things like the compilation of short clips originally posted to Vine featuring his increasingly deranged plasterer is a thing of bleak Beckettian brilliance.

double or nothing

Yes, it's esoteric cricket records and factoids time again. Is that in tribute to the climactic stages of the 2023 Cricket World Cup? Eh, no, not really, but, on the other hand, yeah, OK, whatever, if you like. This list is sort-of-related to the previous one in that it relates to century-scoring feats and in particular scoring a century in each innings of a Test match, something that's only been done 91 times in the 2500+ Test matches that have been played since the 1870s. 

A lot of famous names on that list, you might say, some of them appearing multiple times - Sunil Gavaskar, Ricky Ponting and David Warner are the only people to have done it on three separate occasions. But also a few lesser-known names - I wonder if there are any players who only ever scored two Test hundreds, and both of them were in the same match? Well, hold that thought, as I've looked into it and the answer is yes. This is another one of those records where the list has expanded quite a bit recently - the only entry on the list before 1999 was Jack Moroney of Australia, both of whose Test hundreds came in a single match against South Africa in Johannesburg in February 1950. If my research is correct he has since been joined by four other batsmen, as follows:

Batsman	Country	1st inns	2nd inns	Against	Venue	Date
Jack Moroney	Australia	118	101*	South Africa	Jo'burg	Feb 1950
Wajahatullah Wasti	Pakistan	133	121*	Sri Lanka	Lahore	Mar 1999
Yasir Hameed	Pakistan	170	105	Bangladesh	Karachi	Aug 2003
Peter Fulton	New Zealand	136	110	England	Auckland	Mar 2013
Shai Hope	West Indies	147	118*	England	Leeds	Aug 2017

Yasir Hameed's feat here is unique as the twin hundreds were made in his first Test match, which puts him on another even shorter list whose only other occupant is Lawrence Rowe of West Indies. Rowe made hundreds elsewhere as well, though. 

spaghetti alla carbonfibre

I see I didn't do a stats update in the wake of Europe's demoralising defeat in the 2021 Ryder Cup, so I guess a catch-up is in order in the wake of Europe's glorious victory in the 2023 edition.

Year	Foursomes		Fourballs		Doubles		Days		Singles		Overall
	Eur	USA	Eur	USA	Eur	USA	Fri	Sat	Eur	USA	Eur	USA
1979	4½	3½	3	5	7½	8½	2½-5½	5-3	3½	8½	11	17
1981	2	6	3½	4½	5½	10½	4½-3½	1-7	4	8	9½	18½
1983	4	4	4	4	8	8	4½-3½	3½-4½	5½	6½	13½	14½
1985	4	4	5	3	9	7	3½-4½	5½-2½	7½	4½	16½	11½
1987	4½	3½	6	2	10½	5½	6-2	4½-3½	4½	7½	15	13
1989	3	5	6	2	9	7	5-3	4-4	5	7	14	14
1991	2	6	6	2	8	8	3½-4½	4½-3½	5½	6½	13½	14½
1993	5	3	3½	4½	8½	7½	4½-3½	4-4	4½	7½	13	15
1995	5	3	2	6	7	9	5-3	4-4	7½	4½	14½	13½
1997	5	3	5½	2½	10½	5½	4½-3½	6-2	4	8	14½	13½
1999	4½	3½	5½	2½	10	6	6-2	4-4	3½	8½	13½	14½
2002	3½	4½	4½	3½	8	8	4½-3½	3½-4½	7½	4½	15½	12½
2004	6	2	5	3	11	5	6½-1½	4½-3½	7½	4½	18½	9½
2006	5	3	5	3	10	6	5-3	5-3	8½	3½	18½	9½
2008	3½	4½	3½	4½	7	9	2½-5½	4½-3½	4½	7½	11½	16½
2010	4½	3½	5	3	9½	6½	n/a	n/a	5	7	14½	13½
2012	3	5	3	5	6	10	3-5	3-5	8½	3½	14½	13½
2014	7	1	3	5	10	6	5-3	5-3	6½	5½	16½	11½
2016	2½	5½	4	4	6½	9½	3-5	3½-4½	4½	7½	11	17
2018	6	2	4	4	10	6	5-3	5-3	7½	4½	17½	10½
2021	2	6	3	5	5	11	2-6	3-5	4	8	9	19
2023	7	1	3½	4½	10½	5½	6½-1½	4-4	6	6	16½	11½
Totals	93½	82½	93½	82½	187	165	92½-75½	87-81	125	139	312	304

So one thumping win for the USA and one slightly less thumping win for Europe leaves the overall balance of the stats relatively unaffected. A couple of statistical nuggets to tease out of this year's:

• the 7-1 result in Europe's favour in the foursomes mirrors the record margin (also in Europe's favour) from 2014;
• slightly surprisingly, the 6-6 tie in the singles is the first one in the history of the event in its current form;
• Europe continue to be slightly better than the USA in both the doubles formats, interestingly the extra columns I've added show they also do best on day one, Friday, with the margin narrowing significantly on the Saturday. The missing year, 2010, was the occasion of some catastrophic weather which necessitated a Monday finish and rendered all that by-day analysis meaningless;
• winning both days of the doubles is quite unusual, even in matches that were relatively one-sided overall: Europe in 1987, 1997, 2004, 2006, 2014 and 2018; USA in 2012, 2016 and 2021. Of those years, only Europe in 2004, 2006, 2014 and 2018 and USA in 2016 and 2021 went on to also win Sunday's singles. 2012 at Medinah is unique in that a team won both days of the doubles competition and still lost overall.

Of course the key question here is: after all the doom and gloom at Whistling Straits, how did Europe turn it around to win? There are a few competing theories: some mystery illness affecting the USA team, rumblings over money, questionable USA preparation. There is also the question of the impact of the absent LIV golfers - USA had two LIV players absent who'd been in the 2021 team (Johnson and DeChambeau) whereas Europe had five (Garcia, Casey, Wiesberger, Poulter, Westwood) so in theory it ought to have had more of an impact on Europe. On the other hand at least four of those Europeans were coming to the end of long careers, and maybe an enforced end to their Ryder Cup participation actually had a beneficial effect?

All of this probably ignores the elephant in the room, which is that home advantage has become disproportionate. It has always been significant, with only six of the twenty-two modern tournaments resulting in away wins, but it's getting more so with only one of the last nine (Medinah again). As I sort-of predicted last time, five of the 2023 USA team (Scheffler, Clark, Schauffele, Morikawa, Burns) weren't born the last time they won a Ryder Cup on European soil. I agree with the sentiments expressed here: a few really tight finishes and the occasional away win would benefit the tournament as a whole.

teelebrity crickylikey of the day

A sporting one for you now - here's surprise Open Championship winner Brian Harman and former Australian cricket captain Ricky Ponting. The facial resemblance is the main thing here, at least while they've both got caps on - Ponting still has a pretty full head of hair despite being about twelve years older while Harman is pretty bald - but there's a broader physical resemblance as well, both men being shorter than most of their contemporaries (Harman is 5'7" according to Wikipedia, Ponting 5'9") but with a general air of chunky pugnaciousness. 

you batter you bowler you bet

During the vast aeons of time that (it seemed) Australian opener Usman Khawaja was batting during the first Test match of the current Ashes series, I had occasion to look up his player profile page on Cricinfo, the go-to resource for the stats-hungry cricket nerd. I had plenty of time to do this, as Khawaja's two innings of 141 and 65 in the match occupied 518 balls and 796 minutes and gave him 13th spot on one of cricket's more esoteric lists of batting feats: batting on all five days of a five-day Test match. As you can see from the list, it's not necessarily correlated with gargantuan feats of run-gathering, rather what you might call accidents of timing. In the most extreme example, Indian batsman Cheteshwar Pujara made just 52 and 22 in his two innings against Sri Lanka in Calcutta in 2017, but the various vagaries of the weather meant that the first innings of 52 was spread across three (very truncated) days.

If you're in the mood for more esoteric batting records, though, read on. Khawaja's five-day feat hadn't been completed at the time I looked at his profile, so the headline list of his batting records looked like this:

These are, arguably, less esoteric as they relate to actual feats of run-scoring, specifically centuries, combined with:

• another century, making one in each innings of the same match
• a score in the 90s, a sort of "near miss" companion to the first
• a duck, as a sort of contrasting tears-and-laughter, light-and-shade thing

It struck me that I didn't recall seeing all three listed under a single batsman before, and I wondered whether this was unique to Khawaja. A quick look at each of the relevant lists (and some very rudimentary sorting in Excel) soon revealed that it was not, but at the same time not especially common. Here's the full list, comprising thirteen batsmen - the date represents the date they achieved the third of the three feats (obviously different batsmen will do them in different orders).

Batsman	100/100	100/90	100/0	Qualification date
Hanif Mohammad	1	1	1	December 1964
Garry Sobers	1	1	2	March 1968
Aravinda de Silva	2	1	1	April 1997
Brian Lara	1	1	1	June 2005
Jacques Kallis	2	1	2	October 2007
Andrew Strauss	1	1	3	December 2008
Ricky Ponting	3	1	1	December 2008
Tillakaratne Dilshan	1	1	1	August 2009
Kumar Sangakkara	2	1	1	March 2013
Younis Khan	1	1	1	October 2014
Hashim Amla	1	1	1	January 2016
Virat Kohli	1	2	1	August 2018
Usman Khawaja	1	1	2	March 2022

A couple of footnotes:

• Andrew Strauss and Younis Khan are the only two batsmen on the list who combined these century-related feats with the further one of making a century in their first Test match.
• Ricky Ponting's hundred-and-a-ninety feat is unique in this list for featuring a century and an innings of 99, against South Africa in 2008. The only other batsman to make a 99 and a century in the same Test match is Geoffrey Boycott, for England against West Indies in 1974. Ponting made the century first, Boycott the 99 first.
• I haven't quite got into the gender-neutral thing of calling everyone "batters" yet, not out of any objection to the term (apart from possible pancake-related confusion), just habit. I haven't, after all, spent any part of the last 40-odd years bemoaning the use of the gender-neutral term "bowler" and insisting on "bowlsmen".

what the hell am I doing golfing in LA

The recently-concluded US Open at the Los Angeles Country Club followed, in some ways, a familiar pattern for recent major golf championships: hey, Rory's in contention, can he hold it together on the last day, push on and finally win a first major since 2014 - erm, no.

One way in which it didn't conform to the typical pattern for US Opens was the low scoring, particularly on day one. In particular, there were two leaders who posted a score of eight under par, which given the typically miserly US Open par score of 70 means that they posted rounds of 62, which, as I'm sure you'll know, equals the major championship scoring record. As I'm sure you'll also recall there was a period of 44 years where the major championship scoring record stood at 63, a score first achieved by Johnny Miller at the US Open in 1973 and equalled no fewer than 30 times subsequently before finally being beaten by Branden Grace at the Open in 2017. That round collapsed the record list to a single entry before this year's US Open; the rounds of Rickie Fowler and Xander Schauffele on day one here increase that list to three entries. Note also that just as the old list had a 24-7 split in favour of a round of 63 not winning you the tournament, none of the three 62s posted so far got its owner over the winning line either.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark

Both 62s here were of the standard two-putt-par-on-the-18th variety, which means that both men had a putt for a 61, quite long ones in both cases.

All major rounds of 63 continue to be an irrelevance for the purposes of this list, so Tommy Fleetwood's second major championship round of 63 merits barely a raised eyebrow, both of them having been subsequent to Grace's 62. Even Brooks Koepka's two 63s in successive PGA Championships in 2018 and 2019 only get a shrug and a "so what", even though they both contributed to tournament wins. Rules are rules I'm afraid. Greg Norman and Vijay Singh are the only two men to make multiple 63s while the list was "live".