Unsung

This is Unsung. Introducing the sports stars you don’t know, telling the stories you can’t miss. 

As the final whistle blows on 2024, we’re back with a review of the sporting year. As you might expect by now, we’ll be taking an alternative look through the calendar and picking out its lesser-lauded legends. 

We’ve got pioneers, innovators, outsiders, and entertainers, many transforming sport and making their mark away from the mainstream glare.

So, like a middle-aged bespectacled Turkish sharpshooter, let’s fire the opening shot on 2024: The Unsung Year in Review.

For the second year running, the Unsung podcast has been nominated as a finalist in the Sports Podcast Awards. This time around, we’re shortlisted in two categories: Best Sports Documentary Podcast and Best Olympics and Paralympics Podcast. 

We’d love your vote! You can do so in the links below:

This is Unsung. Introducing the sports stars you don’t know, telling the stories you can’t miss. 

In the UK alone, over four million people participated in some form of swimming in 2023. 

And while the pandemic prompted a flurry of pool closures that continue today, many defied this worrying trend by heading for a dip outdoors in lakes, rivers, lochs, and seas. Over half a million of us took a dip in open water last year. 

And yet, in a twisted irony, Covid-19 also triggered a shortage of qualified lifeguards to keep us safe.

And so, in this episode of Unsung, we meet some of the country’s best lifeguards to discover why they do what they do, and to see if we can’t persuade a few more to follow their lead…

Many thanks Fay Tennet and her lifeguarding team at the Great North Swim for having me tag along as they went about their work with such diligence and expertise. 

My thanks also to the Royal Lifesaving Society for their help and support, and of course to the organisers at the Great North Swim for letting me come along.

Head to the links below to find out more about taking part in the Great North Swim or how to sign up as a volunteer lifeguard.

Quotes:

"I'm a sort of serial volunteer, so I just keep saying yes to stuff. It's great. And it does bring a huge amount of experience of things that you never even think about. For me, my personal drive is that I want to help people love what I love."

"Everyone's got a different story to what brought them to the water's edge. But all those stories have got a common thread, which is that We're all just human and we're all just trying to be better people. So that's why I came here today, just to kind of affirm that. And it's nice to give back."

"I'd always encourage people to volunteer; you get a lot out of it."

"Your days can be really long and really boring and wet and windy, and then within a millisecond something happens, and you've got to be on it. One minute you might be chatting to swimmers and saying, 'Oh, have a nice swim, isn't it lovely?' And the next minute you're being alerted to a medical emergency. And you are part of a team that is responding to basically save somebody's life. It really brings it home to the reason you're there."

"Everything in life is quite heavy for a lot of people. Being in the outdoors is risky. But it's not risky if you do it in the right way. And this event is the right way to do it. You know, and that's why we're here today."

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Bored Olympic lifeguard at Rio 2016

This is Unsung. Introducing the sports stars you don’t know, telling the stories you can’t miss. 

There are hundreds of visually impaired athletes around the world who aren’t able to see the finish line yet can complete a race quicker than most of us can tie our shoelaces. 

Some run far, rather than fast. Some even try swimming or cycling. That they’re able to do so is thanks to a largely undocumented partnership that deserves a bit more love and attention.

And so, in this new episode of Unsung, we’re delving into the hidden world of para sport guides.

We speak to visually impaired Welsh sprinter James Ledger, along with his Scottish guide Greg Kelly, to discover the nuances and challenges involved in building a strong relationship both on and off the track. 

We also speak to American triathlete and Ironman legend Ben Hoffman, as he embarks on a new career as a guide for Owen Cravens, one of the USA’s brightest talents in the paratriathlon. 

Many thanks to all the athletes who spoke to us between their training and events, and best of luck to them in their future events.

Head to the links below to find out more about becoming a para guide.

Quotes:

James

“For me growing up it was very much around fitting in and not standing out for having a disability.”

“I went down to my local Swansea Harriers track and from that moment on, I became obsessed with trying to be as fast as I could be.”

“It’s never nice hearing your sight is getting worse, but thankfully, in the amazing world we live in para sport, I'm still able to do the sport I love.”

“One of the biggest challenges to T11 running is finding a guide. It’s tough to find somebody who's fast enough because I need a guide runner who can pretty much run a second faster than me, so that they can run within themselves, control me to run straight, and also communicating as much as possible throughout the race.”

“I’m really grateful for Greg joining me on my journey. Because he definitely came at my hour of need.”

"The amount of trust I have to put into Greg to allow me to run as fast as I can in a straight line in the dark. Having that relationship is vital.”

“I'll always aim to promote guide runners because I think they're incredible people, you know, they allow people like me to follow their dreams. I think they should be really championed as very much the unsung heroes of my sports”

Greg

“It’s almost like riding a bike, the faster you're going, the more stable it feels. Sometimes with jogging and drills, that's actually the hardest in terms of timing. When we're running fast, it's more normal to keep the arms pumping and legs coming up.”

“The trajectory was just going up and up, with some of our best races being in Switzerland and Paris big. It was great to be given that opportunity and in Switzerland, where we got a PB for James, a British record.”

“James said that he doesn't want me to stop competing and striving for my individual aspirations, but it's something that can develop both of us. So hopefully that’s something that breaks the stereotype that if you're a guide runner, you're only a guide runner.”

Ben

“It's rewarding. It feels good to contribute to somebody else's dreams and goals. Because I can remember what it was like to be that age and it's a special time to be setting out on that mission, on that career that's in front of you.” 

“The first race we did in Tasmania I made a mistake, and I actually did an extra lap on the bike of the 20k course, and so we went from leading the race quite comfortably to falling all the way down to seventh place”

“You're not just guiding them for the 55 minutes to an hour that you're doing the course. It's everything leading up to that. You're spending time with them, going to the meetings, you're in the hotel room with them. It's a lot more than just the race day.”

“The level of responsibility that you feel when you get on a tandem bike and you're going 30 miles an hour around a course, with barriers all around you and two people's lives are on the line, is certainly something that I had never experienced before.”

“My big takeaway from being around all these Paralympic athletes, I'm just inspired. These are amazing people, independent of whatever disability that they're operating with. Just to see them show up and do the work and, and be at the level they are, it just gets me fired up and it makes me get the most out of myself.”

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British Blind Sport/Run Together - Find a guide runner

This is Unsung. Introducing the sports stars you don’t know, telling the stories you can’t miss. In this opening episode of a new series of Unsung, we’re telling the story of the IOC’s Olympic Refugee Team.

This year, the Olympics will feature 36 athletes from 11 different countries of origin, competing in 12 different sports. At the Paralympics, eight athletes and one guide runner will make up the refugee team

This will be the team’s third appearance at the Games, after making its debut in Rio in 2016. Back then, there were close to 60 million displaced people globally. On the eve of Paris 2024, that number has now soared to well over 100 million and is still rising – that’s around 1 in 70 people living on our planet. Putting them all in one place would create the 14th most populous country in the world – and that population is increasing all the time.

But especially in a year typified by highly emotive elections all over the world, there is a tendency to distil the topic of refugees and immigration to faceless numbers and dispassionate data. But each statistic has a human story behind it. You’ll hear a couple of those in this episode.

Matin Balsini and Dorsa Yavarivafa were both born in Iran, the country where almost half of this year’s Refugee Team comes from Iran, giving some indication as to just how bad the situation is for Iranian athletes. 

The Iranian government exerts significant control over sports and often uses athletes for political propaganda, enforcing strict compliance with its ideological mandates. Those who dissent or fail to conform face dire consequences. 

It’s a repressive environment that stifles freedom of expression and forces many talented athletes to defect in search of safety and the liberty to compete without political interference. Athletes like Matin and Dorsa, who share their painful experiences and emotional journeys in finding a new home in the UK, and the stories of their successful route to the Olympics in Paris.

Many thanks to Matin and Dorsa for speaking to us just weeks before their appearance in Paris, and to the IOC for facilitating the interviews. 

Quotes:

Matin

"The one thing I really love about swimming is when you are in the water you cannot hear anything, you basically cannot see anything. And you can scream and no one can hear you."

"At 17, I decided to coach myself. And the hardest thing was, after one year when I improved a lot, the coaches were jealous. They didn't want me to improve because they thought that it made them look small."

"During the session I'd be swimming alone in the pool, and they would just turn the lights off.I had to swim in the darkness."

“I'm so happy that I am going to the Olympic Games and I'm super excited as well. But it's a bit sad for me because I can’t represent my nation anymore.”

Dorsa

“All I had with me for a whole year was my racket. It was just me, my racket, and my mom."

"I was about 14 when we left. It was really hard because I had to leave my family and my friends. I was quiet, depressed, and sad at first, because I was really shocked. But I had to do it, it just wasn't safe for my mom and me to stay in Iran."

"We tried to go, and they pointed a gun at us. They thought we were armed. And then they put us in jail. They separated me from my mom, which was really difficult. I remember how scared I was then. Imagine a 15-year-old girl being away from her mom in a jail. It was the worst nightmare of my life."

"Imagine representing your own country, there is such a power in that. But I'm not able to do that. So that is very sad, but I had to do it."

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Refugee athlete Eyeru Gebru speaks to Eurosport

Hello and Happy New Year! It’s Alexis here from Unsung with our first ever public service announcement.

At the end of our last episode in December, I mentioned that you’d next hear from us in the Spring. But while we continue to work on series 2, forgive me for jumping on the feed a little earlier than planned.

Because, like a school kid eager to show their parents their “cleaned my plate” lunch sticker, I wanted to share the news that Unsung has been shortlisted as a finalist in the 2024 Sports Podcast Awards.

After our rookie season, we’ve been nominated in the Sports Talk Podcast category, pitted against the likes of football legend Ian Wright, top broadcasters Kate Abdo and Simon Jordan, snooker player Shaun Murphy, and three sporting titans from across the Atlantic who’ve nearly 5m followers between them.

And then there's little ol' Unsung. Think David and Goliath, except we’re not David; we’re David’s annoying little dog, yelping for scraps and attention when he goes off to chin the big guys.

Although it’s fair to say we’ve had a little more attention since our nomination.

A new listener recently tweeted us to say our last episode was like, “if you purchased Roy Chubby Brown off of Wish, you would get this guy”. But hey, that counts as a download.