Showboat shambles

QUESTION What examples are there of sporting showboating gone wrong?

AT THE Turin 2006 Winter Olympics, American snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis was about to go down in history as the first ever winner of the women’s snowboard cross competition.

On the penultimate jump, she attempted a method grab, where the boarder holds the heel side of the board in the air, but she landed on the edge of her snowboard and fell. Tanja Frieden, of Switzerland, passed her to win the gold. Jacobellis had to settle for silver.

She later admitted that showboating had cost her the gold, but said: ‘Snowboarding is fun. I was having fun.’

British superbike rider Sean Emmett, who is known for his playboy lifestyle, embarrassed himself in a race at Hampshire’s Thruxton circuit in 2004. He entered the last corner in the lead, took a peek behind him, then began pumping his fist in celebration.

This made him lose balance, and the subsequent wobble allowed rival Sean Rutter to zoom past him. The looks on the faces of Emmett’s support crew were a picture.

Riccardo Russo, one of Italy’s top motorbike riders, made an even bigger fool of himself while leading the 2012 Italian CIV race in Mugello. When he reached the start of the final lap, he mistakenly thought he had won.

To make matters worse, he stood up on his bike’s foot pegs and began boxing the air in celebration — as the other riders whizzed past. He eventually worked out what was happening and finished 14th.

Alison Birch, Nottingham.

THERE was the famous occasion when Irish jockey Roger Loughran failed to win the 2005 Paddy Power Dial-A-Bet Chase at Leopardstown. Much of the interest in the five-runner, two-mile chase centred on whether his mount, Central House, could beat the great Moscow Flyer.

Central House was in front over the final fence and Loughran urged him down the straight. But the jockey mistook an upright bundle of birch for the finishing post ‘lollipop’ and stood up in his irons, pumping the air in victory. Andrew McNamara and A.P. McCoy drove their respective mounts to the line. Central House eventually finished third, with Loughran cringing in embarrassment. Instead of winning €45,000 (£30,839), he had to settle for a paltry €6,300 (£4,317) third prize.

James Smith, Bangor, Caernarfonshire.

QUESTION Who invented the dialysis machine?

WILLEM JOHAN ‘PIM’ KOLFF was born in Leiden, Netherlands, on February 14, 1911, and studied medicine at Leiden University and Groningen University.

One of his first cases was the slow death of a 22-year-old man from renal failure. This prompted Kolff to research artificial renal function replacement.

He was also instrumental in establishing the first European blood bank, in The Hague, in 1940.

Because of World War II, Kolff’s prototype dialysis machine was built with whatever came to hand: car and washing machine parts, cans and even sausage skins.

In the first practical artificial kidney, The Kolff Rotating Drum Dialyser (1943), blood ran around cellulose (a 66ft long sausage skin) tubing which was wound round a drum made of wooden slats, dipping into a ‘bath’ of dialysate to cleanse the blood at the bottom of its turn.

He treated 16 patients with kidney failure, but had little success until 1945 when one woman recovered from a coma and went on to live another seven years.

At the end of the war, Kolff, who did not patent his invention, donated the five artificial kidneys he’d made to hospitals around the world, including the Mt Sinai Hospital in New York.

In the late Forties Kolff continued his research at the Cleveland Clinic, Utah, donating blueprints for his machine to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. This led to the manufacture of the next generation of Kolff’s dialyser, a stainless steel Kolff-Brigham kidney (1948), which paved the way for the first kidney transplant in 1954.

During the Korean War, Kolff-Brigham dialysers were used in the treatment of injured American soldiers.

Kolff was subsequently involved in the development of the artificial heart and an artificial eye, first used in 1999. He died on February 11, 2009.

Andrew Davies, Oxford.

QUESTION Were twohanded swords ever used in serious combat?

FURTHER to a previous answer, the 1496 Great Tournament of Carignano, near Turin, featured two-handed sword combat when 24 knights competed for a bag of gold and the silk handkerchief of the Duchess of Savoy. The winner was my ancestor, Sire de Loriol.

In 1525, with his two-handed sword, he captained 200 horsemen in the Battle of Pavia, under the Holy Roman Emperor against the French king. He received two lordships in Savoy for his services.

Peter de Loriol Chandieu, London SW4.

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