Bronze medallists On the hunt for every sporting statue in the world

There are more statues of Lester Piggott in the UK than there are of sporting women," said the statistician Chris Stride with dismay. "It is really bad; there are hardly any at all."

- Mark Brown

In fact there are 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. Or a joyous, arms-aloft statue of Ferguson outside Pittodrie in Aberdeen.

We know this because of the almost obsessive determination of Stride, a senior lecturer in applied statistics at the University of Sheffield and the force behind From Pitch to Plinth: The Sporting Statues Project. For 14 years Stride has been leading a team that records and researches statues of sports stars around the world.