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Sporting Life: In a gift of shoes, a Games finds soul
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Professional sport isn't a place for hand-holding and yet offering a hand tells us something.
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The coach, Hendrawan, is from Indonesia. The singles team he coaches is Malaysian. The rival is Jamaican. The problem they encounter on the badminton court at the Commonwealth Games is about shoes. The solution is about soul.
Pause for a minute if you will. The history of shoes in sport is more complicated than style, colour, fit and carbon-fibre plates. Sometimes it's about not wearing shoes at all which is what Abebe Bikila chose to do while winning the 1960 Olympic marathon. Sometimes it's about a mismatched pair which is what Jim Thorpe found when he lost his and still rewrote decathlon records at the 1912 Olympics.
