“You can do a lot in a short space of time if you put your mind to it,” she says. Thornley is the most successful product of the original Sporting Giants scheme set up two years ago by UK Sport to recruit talent to height-specific sports. She might have become part of the GB team for handball or volleyball. Instead, her profile matched the demands of rowing’s World Class Start programme, sponsored by Siemens, and she soon found herself balancing precariously and often unsuccessfully in a single scull.

“I seemed to spend my whole time falling in and it was November so the water wasn’t warm,” she says. “But I’d read Steve Redgrave’s autobiography and Matt Pinsent’s to find out what they did day to day so I knew how tough it would be. It’s about what I expected.”

Less expected was the moment last summer when Thornley, seven crewmates and a cox sat on the starting line for the final of the under-23 world championships with a realistic chance of becoming the first British women’s VIII to win a world title. Thornley tried not to think of the strange route that had taken her to the biggest day of her life or of the consequences of victory or defeat. She just rowed for her life.

“We had two days after the heats to hang around for the final and I had a lot of time to think about what had happened to me and what it would be like to win,” she says. “I tried just to think of the processes. I can’t remember the race at all. I knew I’d gone places I’d never been before, pushed myself harder than I ever have done before and it was good to find that out about yourself. We just rowed the perfect race.”

Thornley can remember the whole process of selection for the Sporting Giants quite clearly. The ergo tests, the arm pulls and the leg presses, all monitored for scientific analysis. What she remembers best, though, is feeling normal, normally tall. “I’d never been in a room with so many tall people,” she says. “It was good to be normal. Because I’m around people who are tall I don’t feel different any more and that’s given me a lot of confidence about my height.

“I’m just over six feet three now and I was tall even at 14 so I always felt out of place and a bit gangly. People say nasty things at school and in the showjumping world I always stood out. On the ponies I had to kick my legs back so I didn’t hit the poles with my feet.”

Horses were so clearly Thornley’s passion that her parents moved to a farm near Wrexham to start a stables. Her original pony, Marquis, now 31, still lives in the field there and, when rowing commitments allow, Thornley will return to the sport at which she was talented enough to compete for Wales. After A-levels came a gap year and a chance to pursue a career as a model. In London, they said she was too tall — “I was six feet seven in heels, something ridiculous, and nothing fitted” — so she did some work in Manchester for a year before heading back to London to study business management at City University.

“I was a bit in limbo,” she admits. “I didn’t really know what to do next. Studying wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do. My parents saw an advertisement for the Sporting Giants programme in the paper and a friend heard it on the radio, so I signed up, not knowing what to expect.”

She considers whether any skills are transferable to rowing from showjumping or even the catwalk. “I was nervous about the pain in rowing, but more about messing up and letting people down,” she says. “Handling the nerves helps and I had to make sacrifices in showjumping just as I’ve had to do in rowing. But with rowing I had to become an elite athlete almost overnight.”

Thornley now trains at the University of Bath and, to keep her mind agile, studies French at evening class. Her coach, Paul Stannard, exhorts her to put on more weight, but her physique still seems more suited to the catwalk than the ergo.

Her body is hurrying to catch up with the changes in her life. “If someone had said to me two years ago, ‘Vicky, you’re going win a gold medal in a rowing boat’, I wouldn’t have believed them. It’s happened so fast. It’s changed my life. In a way, I don’t believe what’s happened. It’s been very emotional.

“Now I’ve got to make the step into the senior team for next year because, like everyone, London 2012 is my dream.” It will be a big jump. Vicky Thornley is quite used to those.

By James Corrigan
Friday, 29 February 2008

Sir Steve Redgrave’s somewhat lofty ambition to prove his theory that “if you’re big enough, you’re good enough” took one almighty step forward yesterday with the announcement that his “Sporting Giants” initiative has added 34 rowers, 11 handball players and seven volleyball players to the national squads.

As everything seems to be in British sport nowadays, Redgrave’s project was set up with the 2012 Olympics in mind, although even the five-times gold medallist must have been surprised at the reaction to the nationwide appeal he made at a much-ridiculed launch in Trafalgar Square a year ago.

In all, 3,854 applications were received, which is some response, considering the strict restrictions placed on the candidates. Men had to measure at least 6ft 3in, while the cut-off mark for women was 5ft 11in. Furthermore, they had to be between 16 and 25 and have good, all-round athletic ability. A tall order if ever there was one.

Although perhaps not, if the initial interest and staggering conversion rate are reliable gauges. “This was a mild shake of the tree – we looked under a few rocks and look what we found,” Redgrave said. “This was all about finding tall people who had the right characteristics and some of the hidden talent that has emerged is incredible. I shouldn’t be too shocked, though, because I never thought I would row until my first coach came along and asked me to have a go. Years later I asked him, ‘Why did you pick me?’ He said, ‘Well, you had big hands and big feet’.”

At 6ft 9in, the 17-year-old Chris Gregory can boast two pairs of those and very useful they have proved, too, in propelling him into the British volleyball squad. Like Stuart Campbell, a 25-year-old who was working as a bricklayer when his father heard Redgrave’s call to the skyscrapers on the radio, Gregory knew nothing about the sport for which he is deemed ideal. “I had never seen a handball court before Sporting Giants,” said Campbell, now at the British handball academy in Denmark. “But we’re not just here to make up the numbers – we’re here to win medals.”

Indeed, Redgrave would doubtless claim that is what they were born for, which would be apt as the selection procedures have come straight from an Aldous Huxley novel. There were two stages of testing at six rowing centres, four for would-be handball players and three for volleyball. State-of-the-art equipment instructed the sporting overlords who would be up for it – and who would fall miserably short.

Alas, not all the applicants were totally honest and a few platform-heeled impostors tiptoed through. At least six did not satisfy the height criterion and added the odd inch to their forms. They were still tested, however, and have since graduated to the British canoeing squad. That is not big. But it is clever.

GB Rowing, alongside UK Sport and the English Institute of Sport, are set to test 2,000 people aged between 16-25 who responded earlier this year to a national call for tall people’ to come forward to try out for future Olympic Games.

The testing, starting on July 28, will include physical and aptitude tests and will take place on five different weekends around the country.

Exceptional candidates at these auditions will go through to further testing before a group emerges that GB Rowing can put into its World Class Start scheme, sponsored by Siemens, and which has already produced athletes capable of winning world medals.

The aim is to strengthen Britain’s potential for the 2012 Games and beyond.

One of the testing sessions will be held at the University of Bath on August 11.

* Tall applies to men aged 16-22 and over 1.9m (6′3″) tall and to women aged 16-25 and over 1.8m (6′0″) tall.

I think this is the last of the big 5 world cup footballers. Zeljko Kalac is the Australian goalkeeper who is 6ft 8in tall. (202cm) Joint tallest in the competition with Jan Koller who plays for Czech Republic.

Wikipedia says: Zeljko Kalac (born December 16th, 1972) is an Australian football (soccer) goalkeeper of Croatian descent, who currently plays for A.C. Milan in Italy’s Serie A. He is nicknamed “Spider” thanks to his height (2.02m) and large armspan.

He is an Australian international, though he has spent many years as understudy to first Mark Bosnich, and more recently Mark Schwarzer. He has been selected as a member of Australia’s 2006 World Cup squad.

Here is another tall world cup footballer, Dennis Lawrence matches the height of England’s Peter Crouch. He is a defender for the Trinidad and Tobago team and is 6ft 7in tall. He also plays for Wrexham FC.

So far I have found two:

Nikola Zigic who plays for Sebia is 202cm, or 6ft 8in. The Red Star Belgrade striker is Serbia’s secret weapon – he’s scored 55 goals in 77 matches during the last two seasons, and has been voted Serbia’s player of the year twice in the last three years. And he set up two of Mateja Kezman’s goals in qualifying.

Jan Koller who plays for Czech Republic is also 202cm, or 6ft 8. Koller’s fitness is crucial to the Czech Republic’s chances as he has been recovering from a cruciate knee ligament injury that he sustained last year. He is deadly in the air but is also blessed with a good touch as well. Koller’s international goalscoring record of better than a goal every other has helped him become the Czech’s all-time leading scorer.

                     

Patrick Barkham
The Guardian

Peter Crouch gets the nation body-popping Hands outstretched, elbows rigid at right angles and jerkily moving to an imaginary beat, it is the goal celebration-cum-dance craze that is shaking the nation.

From Burnham-on-Crouch to Crouch End, people are doing the Crouch. The 6ft 7in England striker premiered his own unique version of robotics at the Beckhams’ lavish World Cup party just over a week ago. While Wayne Rooney gingerly wiggled his metatarsal and Rio Ferdinand archly clicked his fingers on the mirrored dancefloor, the gangly Liverpool forward was head and shoulders above his peers as he shape-shifted to James Brown’s funky beat.

But supporters really twitched to attention on Tuesday night, when England met Hungary in their penultimate friendly before the tournament in Germany. At first, Sven’s starlets failed to shine with their predictable adoption of Brazilian forward Bebeto’s baby-rocking goal routine to mark John Terry’s headed goal. It was, admittedly, in a good cause: his girlfriend has just given birth to twins. Then Peter Crouch took to the field and promptly upstaged his more celebrated team-mates. Spinning like a top to shoot as accurately as Robin Hood, he scored an immaculate goal and celebrated with an eye-popping display: face taut with concentration, he mimicked a robot as he moved one way, then the other. Was it a stick insect after too many coffees? A beanpole spasm in the breeze? Or was it the stirring sight of the best kind of English hero – the unheralded kind – whose unpredictable skills might just bring home the World Cup on Sunday July 9?

As Crouch shuffled, a collective gasp passed through the watching millions. Instead of anguishing over the merits of 4-1-4-1, or whether Stevie Gerrard should be stuck in the hole, England fans were suddenly thinking, hell, with moves like that we can win this thing.
What inspired Crouch to become lord of the dance? England were still World Cup holders when the very first precursors of robotics took hold among the gangs of Los Angeles and New York. American kids invented locking and popping, which became part of the US disco mainstream in the Seventies as Charlie Robot performed “the robot” on the Soul Train TV programme. And Crouch was still in nappies when Jeffrey Daniels of Shalamar became the first man to appear on British television popping his body. Soon, everywhere – from Tramp to the Cub Scout disco – reverberated to the pop and lock of robotics. Crouch may not have learned his moves in the cradle.

According to Paul Gascoigne – former holder of the best England goal celebration for his “dentist’s chair” – the dance is a riposte to critics who first jeered and then sneered that Crouch was a stiff, predictable, robotic sort of player.

Howard Tam, a street dancer and teacher with the Foundationz Cru, is not too impressed with Crouch’s robotics. But it is, he concedes, difficult to get a robotic rhythm when you are not performing to music. Robotics is not about how you start, it is about how you stop. “If he wants to do it properly he’s got to be a lot harder when he hits his moves and he’s got to stop faster. When you stop your movements that’s when what we call “the hit” comes. That goes with the body-popping as well,” says Tam. “You’ve got to be loose, then you’ve got to be rigid. Where he is changing direction with his arms going up and down, it’s got to be a lot more forceful. It’s got to shake the dancefloor [or the football pitch]. There’s got to be more force.”

Lacking a memorable official World Cup song, England have at least stumbled upon a dance move to galvanise the fans. He’s got the world at his feet and if England’s tall, thin hope can do the Crouch six or seven times on the pitch in the coming month, we will all be dancing in the streets.

Taken from The Independent

Boxing: Big win for the beast
BRIAN DOOGAN
He is 7ft, weighs 24st and is billed as a freak but Nicolay Valuev has the last laugh by claiming the WBA heavyweight title
Paul Gallico, the American novelist, once wrote about “the tale of the living giant, a creature out of the legends of antiquity, who was made into a prizefighter and became the heavyweight champion”. It was, he insisted, the most “scandalous, pitiful, incredible story”, for Primo Carnera, the Ambling Alp from Italy who won the title from Jack Sharkey and fought Joe Louis, was never anything more than “a fourth-rater at prizefighting ”. Last night in Berlin, 10,000 people came to the Max Schmeling Halle to gape and guffaw at Carnera’s successor, the Beast from the East, Nicolay Valuev, who stands 7ft, weighs 24st and bears a disturbing resemblance to Neanderthal Man. In fighting terms, he was a fourth-rater at best but after 12 rounds of uninspiring boxing he somehow became the new WBA heavyweight champion of the world — there are three others who also lay claim to the heavyweight title, Lamon Brewster, who holds the WBO version, Chris Byrd, the IBF champion, and Hasim Rahman, the WBC champion. They are all journeymen at best.

The 32-year-old Russian’s extraordinary challenge for the WBA belt, which had been held by the ordinary John Ruiz, owed everything to its freak value and nothing to the standards of what was once the richest prize in sport. “Come one, come all. Watch Shrek box,” was how the Boston Globe, Ruiz’s hometown newspaper, summed up the fight. It was a spectacle that belonged beside the bearded lady and fortune teller in a three-ring circus. Not even the presence at ringside of Muhammad Ali, whose daughter, Laila, boxed on the undercard, could invest this freak show with a semblance of dignity. The result, with two judges scoring for Valuev, with the third making it a draw, was wrong but the fact that it was even open to debate said everything about the state of heavyweight boxing and Valuev’s place in it.

A Goliath in gloves and a blue pair of trunks that could double as curtains, Valuev showed the athletic grace of a herd of buffalo on the stampede. This was his 44th fight in an unbeaten career that has taken him to fistic fairgrounds in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, then around the world to Sydney, Yokohama, Prague, Minsk, Seoul and even London. “The hardest part of the night,” Ruiz had mused, “will be helping to get him up. He has a head the size of a Volkswagen. I won ’t be able to miss.” But this King Kong took all his assailant’s shots and roared hard enough to win. Ruiz found him harder to hit than he expected and the giant proved game, standing up to the hooks that the champion smashed against his chin and into his massive midriff. “A tugboat and a super tanker, that’s how it looks to me,” said a wag at ringside. “Robbery,” cried Ruiz.

Valuev, the unlikely successor to Dempsey, Louis and Ali, has been packaged as cruelly as the sad Carnera once was. Most of Valuev’s opponents have been cannon fodder. One, an American called Gerald Nobles, was so unnerved when he came face-to-navel with Valuev at the weigh-in that he deliberately aimed blows to the behemoth’s knees to get himself disqualified when they fought.

With a pawing jab and a telegraphed right hand, Valuev had built a reputation. In little arenas, using his massive body to intimidate his fear-ridden foes, he was able to make a living. “Because of his size, he was promoted as a sideshow act but I saw in him something different,” said Wilfried Sauerland, the German promoter who signed him up two years ago. “I believed with effort and better training he could become world champion.”

Valuev earned his opportunity to fight for a championship belt with a controversial majority decision against Larry Donald. The American made him look like the ungainly colossus that he is when any opponent is able to move a little too quickly and a little too often — Ruiz’s movement last night was ineptly negligible — but, in the eyes of the judges, Donald had not done enough. “He was able to make it look, just by his sheer size, that he was hitting me when he wasn ’t,” said Donald. “I never faced a man like him ever and I never seen a man like him either.”

Valuev was 6ft 7in by the age of 16, the freakish effect of the same pituitary gland disease that afflicted Carnera. “I have always been bigger, even from when I was an infant,” Valuev explained. “I always knew I was going to be very large when I became a man. The question was how large.”

As a boy, he had a passion for sport. When somebody suggested he should learn to box he was set on a path always more likely to meet with the gawking that preceded last night’s tainted glory.

“Growing up was magnificent. I was happy. But I never dreamt of becoming champion, becoming rich and having the chance to travel all over the world,” Valuev said. “I did not think this could happen to me through boxing. The sport was very popular in Russia and I began boxing in 1992. I was 20 and I wanted to do something active. I had about 13, 14 amateur fights, not many, but because of my size and strength I was able to become the Russian national championship silver medallist in 1993. At first, boxing was a hobby but I decided to become a professional fighter quickly.”

Despite the derision, Valuev never gave up on his dream and Ruiz’s failure to box more assertively created the necessary illusion for the big man in the eyes of the judges.

“I know what people think. Of course, I’m very strong and I’m huge and not what people usually see in a boxer. But I have heart. I’ve been knocked down and I’ve got up and now I’ve proved I’m a champion, too,” Valuev declared. “My boxing skills are improving all the time. I’ve surprised people that I’ve been able to go 12 rounds. Because of my different size I do a certain type of training to strengthen my powers of endurance. I train about five hours a day and more than that as I get closer to a fight. If people take me seriously or not, that is up to them. But I take boxing very seriously. It’s a serious business when two men climb into the ring.”

He is a champion now but still people snigger when they catch a glimpse of the giant. “Big guy,” said a cynical old man with a cigar and a heavy New York accent. “Can’t fight a lick.”

Recently signed to Liverpool for £7 million, he is worth over £30,000 per centimetre.

Graeme Taylor says of Crouch:

“Everyone simply talks about his height, because he’s 6ft 7in, as if that’s all there is to him. But I can assure everyone he is very good technically and his touch will be as good as the other Liverpool players, there is no doubt about that.

“He’s had to live with jibes about his height and I’m so pleased for him because this boy can play.”

“Look at his touch, look at his passing, look at his control, how he lays people in, how he holds off defenders, that’s the sort of player we are talking about.”

“There are too many people who will not look at him just because he’s very tall. But look at Jan Koller, one of the best Czech strikers around – he’s 6ft 7in too.”

Sadly Andy Roddick just beat Croatian Ivo Karlovic in the Stella Artois title with a tight 7-6 7-6 victory. Roddick said: “Ivo’s serve is probably the biggest weapon in tennis… that was not fun at times.”

Karlovic, at 6ft 10ins is the tallest man in professional tennis. Fingers crossed him for him during Wimbledon.

See other inspirational tall people here and here.