Gobsmackingly interesting day!
Mostly because I was assigned an interesting story that revealed to me some startling facts.
The basic story, as broken by the pommie papers, is that our top soccer start currently playing on their soggy little island - one Benni McCarthy - has lost 13kg.
It seems that he went on his personal load shedding mission after he was fined a whopping R880 000 by his football club West Ham United. This, I have to admit, I at first thought was a tad excessive. I mean, how many of us can identify with the poor lad's troubles? But then I discovered that R880 000 was equal to two week's pay.
Jeeez Louise! I had no idea that soccer players earned that much. Admittedly he is a Premier League player. But 40 000 quid? A week!! Compare that with columnist David Bullard's recent noting on his NewsTime website that some SA journalists are willing to work for as little as R35 000 a month (*ahem* that would be 3 150 quid for my international reader) - an amount he further notes is equal to what someone he knows spends on whisky alone in a month.
I am betting that Benni's mom is extremely thankful that he decided to become a soccer player rather than a journalist!
And so after being fined two week's pay, or the equivalent of a townhouse in Weltevreden Park, Benni signed himself into some clinic in Austria where he proceeded to lose 13kg and is now on course to regain his spot in the team.
My contribution to this rivetting international story was to find out what the impact of losing such a vast amount of weight is likely to be on the body of a 6 foot tall professional athlete.
It was a bit difficult considering that the timeframe detailing his weight reduction regime could be found nowhere, so the passionate experts I tracked down agreed that maybe it was good and no harm done because our portly lad had been sporting an unhealthy boep. But it could have been bad if he lost it all too fast because maybe he didn't just dump body fat, and has lost muscle strength and tone.
Who knows?
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Fascinating. Erm...
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