There is a story about a man who repeatedly hits himself on the head with a mallet. When asked why he does it, he says: ‘Because it feels so good when I stop.â€
This elderly joke was brought to mind last week by reports that two England rugby players, Lawrence Dallaglio and Joe Worsley, had been undergoing cryotherapy.
After the furore generated last year when the corpse of the baseball legend Ted Williams was cryogenically frozen, this news was initially a cause of some alarm.
Were the England duo planning to be held in a deep freeze until some future date when they would be defrosted to form an invincible back row with the former Red Sox slugger, Walt Disney and ‘Grandpa†Bredo Morstoel (kept on ice in a shed in Nederland, Colorado, — home of the Frozen Dead Guy Day celebrations — since 1993). Luckily it seems this is not to be the case.
Cryotherapy simply means treating injuries with ice. Put a packet of frozen peas on that shin you’ve just banged on the coffee table while making a grab for the channel changer so that your kids don’t have to witness the grizzly scenes the TV companies are beaming into our living rooms daily (insert your own Francis Jeffers joke here), and you are undergoing cryotherapy.
Sadly, it seems that in Tony Blair’s Britain we do not possess a packet of peas big enough to wrap an international rugby forward in and so Dallaglio and Worsley had to travel to Poland to feel the benefit. Emerging after a couple of minutes standing in a compartment cooled by liquid nitrogen to as low as minus 110ÞC, Dallaglio expressed himself delighted. ‘It gives you a general feel-good factor,†said England’s number eight, keenly aware that in sports-speak ‘factor†is the new ‘basisâ€.
While no one would doubt that having your brain frozen is ideal preparation for spending much of Sunday afternoon with your head perilously close to Jason Leonard’s bottom, the more cynical may be forgiven for asking why, if freezing temperatures are so beneficial for rugby players, Inuits have not made more impact on the sport. Then again, half a century ago people mocked Britain’s 50km walker Don Thompson — ‘Mighty Mouse†— when he prepared for the Rome Olympics by training in his bathroom surrounded by steaming water, boiling kettles and drying laundry.
Thompson won the gold medal. The fact of the matter is that sports people are always looking for an edge. Rocky Marciano, for example, tried to stand facing into the wind as much as possible because he thought it would toughen his skin against cuts.
It was a nutty idea but, frankly, since the Brockton Blockbuster could fell an ox with his right hand, who was going to tell him? Besides which, while Marciano went on
believing he was enjoying a corporeal advantage, he was clearly gaining a psychological one. The wind may not have made the Rock’s eyebrows any harder, but it boosted his morale.
As the quest to find that extra something becomes more desperate, training regimens have come to look increasingly cranky. The Australian fast bowler Brett Lee has recently been seen training with a parachute on his back and a number of top athletes sleep in rooms where negatively ionised air is circulated because they believe it promotes a sense of well-being. Others prefer to slumber beneath tents, which apparently bring the same benefits as living at high altitude without the bother of actually going up a mountain.
Golfers have taken to getting ready for tournaments by spending time in sensory deprivation tanks. Whether this improves their game I am not sure, but it is clearly ideal mental preparation in case they get stuck in a hotel lift with Colin Montgomerie. In the past Nick Faldo and Sandy Lyle have both gone down the beachball-between-the-knees-triangle-on-the-head route. Many amateur golfers have followed them. A glance through any golf magazine will reveal a greater selection of bizarre aids for increasing length and performance than can generally be found on the sort of websites that offer a free pack of X-rated fortune cookies with every purchase of $25 or more. Or so a friend tells me.
Although some of these regimes and devices will undoubtedly bring physical and technical benefits to the user, it is clear that others are working on much the same level as Don Revie and his lucky suit. South Korea’s all-conquering women’s archery team put their success down to some of the weirdest training routines in history.
Their workouts included running through sewage with a tyre strapped to their backs, a military-style beach landing and a jog up a mountain carrying a boat. This may be straight out of the old sergeant-major school of football management, but it’s unlikely that even Mick Lyons or John Beck would have taken their players on a late-night visit to a crematorium, blindfolded them and ordered them to pick bones out of the incinerators.
Nor, I suspect, did Dave Bassett ever hand out a box of live snakes and tell the Crazy Gang to pick them up and gently bite them. Apparently the feeling after surviving one of these ordeals is one of relief and happiness — much the same as when you stop hitting yourself with a mallet.