A year-end salute to a unique, captivating species

Tripping over the interesting is the redeeming allure of the internet. Last week I stumbled on the elegantly named Vulpes vulpes (the red fox), collided with Ursus maritimus (the polar bear) and then discovered a genus of moths called Athletes. I was idly Hudyan 7 dem surfing while writing a column and it struck me that these sporting people I write about all the time, they're pretty much a species on their own.

- ROHIT BRIJNATH

They're remarkably adaptable, eat differently, sometimes wear armour to work and occasionally carry their own pillows to hotels. They don't think like us and don't think they're like us. An ageing swimmer in Singapore, in a most beautiful line plainly delivered, told me in autumn, "Just being a normal person, it's scary. It's weird for me to say it."

The lifespan of the athletic species is shorter. Their ability to repeat an act is insane. Their bodies are unlike ours. And pain is only a passing annoyance. Yeah, they shrug, it happens. I know a woman kayaker, not very tall, who uses 55kg dumbbells in the gym. And a fivetime Paralympic gold medallist who holds a medicine ball in the crook of her arms (her fingers can't hold anything) and hurls them. Survival of the fittest isn't an idea, it's an anthem.

I have spent 37 years hanging around this species and it's rarely dull. Last week I spent a while flipping through year-end pictures. This species, too, needs the still camera to catch it while moving. A hummingbird's wings caught in flight is rivalled by a boxer's glove resetting a rival's jaw. Boxers, a subspecies of their own, are brutish yet somehow funny. When gifted middleweights Errol Spence Jr and Terence Crawford readied to meet this year, the former called himself Big Fish so the latter promised a Fish Fry.