Olympic Sport: The Whole Muscle-Flexing Story

If it’s an Olympics year, then it’s time for Glenn Murphy’s clever mash-up of sport facts and physiological education to take another lap of the bookshops. Some of the material appeared in Does Farting Make You Faster? his 2012 entry; a question that is important enough to be run out again inside this new edition. It’s been dropped on the cover now in favour of the more prosaic title, but there is the reassurance there that Murphy is also the author of Why is Snot Green?, so will not be too boring. These titles, appealing to a child’s interest in what are often perceived as the more disgusting of bodily functions, alert the reader to the approach of the book as a whole. It takes Olympic events one by one and serves up some wholesome information about how your body works and how you too might become an athlete, with some tasty jokes and cartoons to make the science slip down more easily. Murphy is properly interested in using an interest in the Olympics to get more children taking part in sport and reassuring them that anyone can get better with training and application. I’m not sure, however, that the statement “most healthy people should be able to reach Olympic levels of speed and strength with the right kind of training” is true. This is, after all, elite sport, and there are any number of athletes with the same training and application who never reach the Olympic standard. But that shouldn’t discourage anyone who is thinking of taking Murphy’s advice about staging their own quasi-Olympics in the local park.