“There are more statues of Lester Piggott in the UK than there are of sportswomen,” said statistician Chris Stride wistfully. “Too bad… nothing at all.”
In fact, there are few sportswomen who are celebrated with public statues. They include champion Mary Peters on the outskirts of Belfast; 1930s Wimbledon champion Dorothy Round in Dudley; and late footballer Lily Parr at the Manchester Football Museum.
This compares with more than 350 men, from Steve Ovett on Brighton beach to John Curry on an ice rink in Sheffield, and a badly designed statue of Alex Ferguson outside Old Trafford in Manchester. Or the happy, towering statue of Ferguson outside Pittodrie in Aberdeen.
We know this thanks to the almost serious determination of Stride, a senior lecturer in applied statistics at the University of Sheffield and the driving force behind the From Pitch to Plinth: Sports Statues project.
For 14 years, Stride has led a team that records and researches the world’s top male and female sports figures.
It is a never-ending project. In the coming weeks he will add about 20 UK statues and 120 US baseball statues. “There are about 120 monuments around the world that we have to add. We get them all the time. They are hard to find on the internet… I can translate the word statue into many different languages for you.”
Stride started this project in 2010 for simple reasons. “One of my colleagues came into my office and said he saw a lot of football statues on his way to the games – ‘Do you know where they are?’
“I’m a statistician. If someone asks how many of something there are, I need to know. I went out and counted how many there were, actually.”
He soon realized that the interesting thing about this project was not the bald figures, but the stories of the monuments and what they can tell us about society as a whole.
“There’s a lot of crazy stories behind it, a lot of interesting people that have come together to talk about it,” Stride said.
In the study, nothing was written about this matter, which Stride prepared with enthusiasm.
He said that since the 1990s, statues were considered an effective tool for marketing sports teams, something that started in America and spread.
The reasons are mixed but “basically, it’s been shown that fans are more attached to a team if they feel bad about it”.
They also help to give new stadiums, which may look like warehouses from the outside, another form of identity, that is why, outside Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, people will find statues of Tony Adams , Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Ken Friar and Herbert Chapman, who was manager of Arsenal between 1925 and 1934, won the league four times in five years.
Stride says it’s interesting that sports monuments don’t tend to be in big city centers but in smaller areas that have often lost traditional industries.
“It’s the idea of trying to restore identity to that town. Community art has always been used to try to do that, so between the 1920s and the 80s community art was almost art, not clear. Studies have shown that people are not really involved in the arts.”
Stride said.
That’s why places like Ashington (Jack Charlton) and Barrow (Emlyn Hughes, Willie Horne) have sporting monuments. “They are often towns that have lost their important industries and are still holding on to something that will give them an identity.”
Sports monuments are also interesting in how many have missed them.
A recent statue of Harry Kane in Walthamstow has been widely mocked, joined by a barrage of grisly assassinations including Ronaldo’s stunning wave at Madeira airport which was graced by Saturday Night Live and Maradona’s 12ft in Kolkata, India, which was said to look better. like Bobby Ewing from Dallas, football manager Roy Hodgson, or “someone’s gran”.
Stride said there is a clear reason why so many are bad. “It’s a very difficult thing to do.
“When I started the project I talked to a lot of artists, maybe 20 or 30 of them, and the one thing they said in general is that sculpting a football player is really difficult. It’s not like Queen where you just have a head and a flowing dress.
“With footballers you have the legs, the body shape – the fans will recognize the shape. The most difficult thing is to get the feeling to get involved in it. ”
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