What sports are the English any good at?

Cycling
Bog snorkling
Squash
Crown green bowls
Equestrian
Rowing


erm struggling after that.

 

Not bad at golf, rose, westwood, poulter, donald etc

 

Triathlon

 

Although the list is out of date, according to wikipedia, there is an Englishman as world champion in:

Snooker
Billiards
Team Squash
Pea Shooting
and Triathalon

 

Darts, snooker, dominos..............owt that involves sitting in a boozer with a pint

 

Basically all hobbies that through some convoluted means have been made "competitive"

 

Triathlon is quite a hobby!

 

All sorts. Just look at the number of medals we won at the 2012 Olympics in all the different disciplines. We're an amazing country for sport. Almost 3 times as many gold medals as both Germany and France, and just 9 behind China. 3rd in the medal table. 4th in the medal table 4 years earlier in China.

We're down on ourselves because the national football team hasn't won the world cup for years and while we're certainly not the best in the world at the game, we're pretty decent at it. Same with cricket, we're not the best in the world right now, but we were not too long ago. The other big team game is rugby and while we're not the best in the world at that either, we're still good at it.

We're not the kind of country that excels at one particular sport, we do all sorts and challenge the best in the world at most of them. The only area we don't do particularly well in is winter sports (we don't have any snow or mountains) but even in that we won medals at the last Olympics.

We're a fantastic sporting nation and we should be proud of that.

 

Fishing.

 

You're right Jay, for our population we do very well at many of the Olympic sports.

Personally, I don't see being the best in the world at cricket or rugby as being that much of an achievement as they aren't widely adopted, particularly cricket which only seems to be played in former British colonies. Don't get me wrong it's nice to get one over on the Aussies in both sports but neither have worldwide appeal - a bit like the yanks with their baseball "World Series" which no-one outside of North America gives a sh*t about.

The one we all want to be best at is football but in this country we seem to have sacrificed the development of our own players to create a league which people all over the world want to watch - that wouldn't be the case if every team was made up of 8 or 9 English players.

 

Darts world champion is Dutch
Snooker world champion is an Aussie I believe.

 

I reckon that's the thing, because we're not the best in the world at football, we don't consider ourselves a good sporting nation. Football is our national sport, millions of us love to watch it, but when it comes to participating, we take part in hundreds of different sports not just football. Brazil has a population three times bigger than the UK, but at the last Olympics they won just 3 gold medals compared to our 29. That's because everyone in Brazil plays football and does little else sporting wise. Spain, another football super power, also won just 3 gold medals. Again, they're all football daft and do very little in other sports. We're not like that in the UK, we play a broad range of sports, win all sorts of things, but as a result we're not the best in the world at our national game. We never will be, because our sporting talent is spread so wide.

 

I remember Atlanta 96 where we had virtually no medal hopes and only won 1 gold medal (Rowing obviously), then hopes were pinned on Linford retaining his crown even though he was well past his peak but ended up double false starting and being disqualified. This must have caused some embarrassment to the British sporting authorities because after this we basically invested so much money that almost all our Olympic athletes could become pro and the money we spend continues to rise. I wonder if other countries are doing the same? I'm not meaning to sound negative, it's just I wonder are we merely following what the rest of the developed world is doing or are we effectively buying some of these medals.

This article shows where the funds are allocated

 

My Aussie mate reckons we are good at sports that involve sitting or hitting ****. He's just bitter though.

 

Think the nipsy trophy is still held in England