Sporting skills that would be most/least use in real life emergencies

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Boxing, or mixed martial arts, I reckon, would be something you'd want around you. If attacked by a gang of pro-Brexit pensioners, I'd like Tyson Fury to walk round the corner and kick the shit out of the racist old bastards.

Weightlifters. Always handy to have someone around who can pick up a fridge with no bother when you're remodelling a kitchen.

Racing drivers - handy if you need to make a quick getaway or get to the airport in a hurry, although I bet Lewis Hamilton is crap in a Nissan Almera.

Golfers. I'm trying to imagine any emergency situation where someone would cry "oh, can no-one propel this small object 200 yards over there with reasonable accuracy, for the love of God!?"

[Kevin S]

Racing drivers - handy if you need to make a quick getaway or get to the airport in a hurry, although I bet Lewis Hamilton is crap in a Nissan Almera.

Er... no:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN-ChMp4uR4&t=5m49s

(edit - or, if you can't be arsed to watch it, the professional racing drivers who took Top Gear's Suzuki Liana round the track were all 2 seconds faster than the very fastest celebrity, Ellen MacArthur.)

[elguapo4]

Modern Pentathlon is supposed to represent the 5 skills the Kings messengers needed while doing their job, Fencing,Shooting,Swimming,Horse Riding and Running

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

So unless you needed to finish a sword fight, shoot someone, swim across a lake, leap on a horse then flee on foot...? Actually that probably happens quite a lot in Chorley

[San Bernardhinault]

If a thousand highly toxic butterflies died at several thousand feet and were falling slowly to earth and you had to make sure they didn't touch anybody, perhaps your badminton skills would come in handy.

[Janik]

Modern Pentathlon is supposed to represent the 5 skills the Kings messengers needed while doing their job, Fencing,Shooting,Swimming,Horse Riding and Running

My understanding was it was the skills needed by a modern (in 1896) cavalry officer.

[Janik]

If a thousand highly toxic butterflies died at several thousand feet and were falling slowly to earth and you had to make sure they didn't touch anybody, perhaps your badminton skills would come in handy.

Racquet sport skills are handy for swatting insects. Live ones. Some swatters even look pretty well the same. If a swarm of hornets comes your way, pray that Gail Emms is nearby and suitably armed.

[Jah Womble]

Caber-tossing skills could be of use should one need to dispose of one or more telegraph poles into a giant wood chipper.

[Janik]

Or to clear a fallen trunk off a road so an ambulance could get through.

[Jah Womble]

That would adhere more to an 'emergency', yes.

How quickly one might be able to locate a burly Scotsman should this occur in Surrey or south-east Kent might pose something of an issue, however.

[Kevin S]

Strongman Hafþór Björnsson (or 'The Mountain') recently broke his own world record for 'weight over the bar', another of the standard heavy events at the Highland Games:



That's a 25kg weight over a bar more than 6 metres high. So he probably could, for example, sling a 7 year old child, or a fairly large dog, up onto a roof, should the situation call for it.

And indeed you may notice he cleared it fairly easily, setting himself up to break his own record again sometime next year.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Tug-of-war could be handy for rescuing distressed animals stuck in quicksand.

[Janik]

How quickly one might be able to locate a burly Scotsman should this occur in Surrey or south-east Kent might pose something of an issue, however.

A better chance than having an Olympic medal winning Badminton player armed with an electronic fly swat to hand when the killer swarm hoves into view. Relatively speaking, that is. The chances are still minute, but burly Scotsmen are in marginally greater supply even in the South of England. Never around when you need them, these people! Don't they understand their skills come with responsibilities???

[Sits]

Top kabbadi players must surely be in high demand for certain circumstances. Crowd control?

[Southport Zeb]

Top kabbadi players must surely be in high demand for certain circumstances. Crowd control?

If the crowd is disgustingly smelly

[Haddock]

I remember a Tiger or Roar and Score (or maybe Scorcher and Score) strip in which at the climax of the story a goalkeeper who was on a tour of a nuclear power plant dived to catch a piece of debris that was hurtling towards a window behind which was the plant's radioactive core. I think the keeper had been let go by his club but his skills in averting nuclear catastrophe persuaded that club or another to give him a further chance to prove himself. Anyway, being a goalkeeper with cat-like reactions could prevent the next Chernobyl.