Karelin

I’ve decided to give the Olympics another chance. After all, there’s more to the Olympics than the 100m back-stroke or the great equestrian dressage. It’s also because I recently came across the story of possibly the meanest bastard who ever stepped on a podium. Alexandr Karelin, a 140kg beast of a wrestler from Siberia, who was so super-humanly strong that he could throw his genuinely terrified superheavyweight opponents through the air and on to their backs - something thought impossible in the heavy weight categories. His opponents called him 'The Experiment' because of his unreal proportions - no trace of a fat, just a physique that looked like it was drawn in a comic. Lat muscles that literally came out of his waist at a 45 degree angle. Apparently he used to carry fridges up 10 flights of stairs. Anyway after once losing a Soviet championship bought as a teenager in the 1980s he never lost a single bout until the Sydney Olympics in 2000, when he lost in the final 1-0 in the biggest shock of the Games, to an American who scored a lucky point and then basically ran away from him for the rest of the bout. Indeed it was the first point he had even conceded in something like 10 years. He retired with 3 consecutive Olympic golds and a silver. If there isn’t anyone worth rooting for from the Indian contingent (is there?) I’m backing Russia. The land of Tolstoy, the circus and the Kalshnikov. I bet, somewhere in the afterlife, Nehru can’t stop beaming.