Chris Stride is on a mission to track down sports statues around the globe.
For 14 years, Stride has been leading a team that records and researches statues of sportsmen and women. It is a project without end. In the coming weeks he will add about 20 more statues to the UK list and another 120 US baseball statues.
So, why is he doing this? Well, he began the project in 2010 for a very simple reason. “One of my colleagues came into my office and he said he had seen a lot of football statues as he went to games - ‘Do you know how many there are?’ I’m a statistician. If someone asks how many are there of something, I need to know. I went out and counted how many there were, basically.” And he's still counting. Maybe you know of one that he doesn't?
Stride is a senior lecturer of applied statistics at England's University of Sheffield and the driving force behind From Pitch to Plinth: the Sporting Statues project. The objective is to track down all UK sporting statues, US baseball statues, world cricket statues, and world football statues. His website helpfully also includes maps.
Over the past decade or so, his quest has thrown up some interesting oddities.
“There are more statues of Lester Piggott [the jockey] in the UK than there are of sporting women,” he laments. “It is really bad … there are hardly any at all.” In fact, there are a fewer than a handful of sporting women celebrated with public statues. They include the pentathlete Mary Peters on the outskirts of Belfast; the 1930s Wimbledon champion Dorothy Round in Dudley; and the trailblazing footballer Lily Parr at the National Football Museum in Manchester.
That is compared with more than 350 men, from Steve Ovett on Brighton seafront to John Curry at the ice skating arena in Sheffield, to a grimly determined arms-folded statue of Alex Ferguson outside Old Trafford in Manchester (pictured above).
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