All updates can be found on www.sportingconnections.com

There was a period sometime between the age of 6 and 9 when we were taken to horse riding lessons. I am not sure if it is because of the flies, the heat, or the bouncing up and down for hours at a time, but I don’t have too many memories of the horsey period. The couple that stick are somewhat interesting though.

We were out on a ride through the bush one day with about 8 other kids and the instructor when my brother’s horse decided to bolt and pretty much just disappeared off down the dirt track that we were following. I remember pulling on the reins of my own horse as hard as my little arms could pull to stop it careening off after my bro. As there was only one instructor with us she had to keep us all together and just hope my bro was ok (obviously no suing was going on back then!); about 20 mins later we came across my bro walking back down the path towards us, pretty bruised and battered. He’d managed to hang on for about 10mins at full gallop and finally got flung off and landed stomach first on a tree trunk… how he never broke anything is one of the wonders of the modern age. He got to double up with the instructor all the way home where we found his horse happily chewing away at some cud.

Another day after a marathon ride through the bush mum made the mistake of arriving late to pick us up; my brother had somehow managed to find a box of matches so we wondered off into the bush and thought we’d start a little fire behind a large rock. After piling up a bit of grass (the long hip length dried out brush that is found around Africa) and a few twigs, we threw a couple of matches on it and were thrilled to watch watch it spark up and build into a nice little fire… we were somewhat less thrilled to watch the wind pick up a few sparks and send them into the dried out brush just slightly downwind! Within seconds the brush was ablaze and spreading rapidly through the brush toward the stables; we did the only thing that two young, honourable and mature kids would ever do, we bolted and ran as fast as we could to get around the other side of the stable area to make it look like we had nothing to do with the fire. It didn’t take long for one of the farmhands to spot the smoke and fortunately the 10 or so farm hands managed to put it out using wet sacks before it did any real damage. Although I am sure we would have been the prime suspects, we never got into any trouble as no one could prove anything. Oliver had bailed the matches long ago and we were the picture of innocence.

Latest postings can be found at:

http://www.sportingconnections.com/component/option,com_portal/Itemid,67/

I will never forget the day we got the first television in our little house in Botswana, it was so exciting. Although I had watched TV at a friends house on the odd occasion, and had also watched it on the occasional trip back to the UK to visit the grandparents, it was super exciting seeing those multi-coloured lines show up (anyone older than 30 knows what I’m talking about, no auto-tune and Hi-Def on these puppies) in our own home. We spent the first night watching it for hours, realised it was crap and boring, and got back to what made us tick… being active. I was 8 years old at the time! My parents held off from getting a TV long enough for us to realise what a wasted of time it was when we could be outside doing “stuff”.

 

Botswana was a truly wonderful place for a rug-rat to grow up; our life was focussed on being outdoors and active and, with mum’s businesses going from strength, we were truly spoilt. As I mentioned previously, we spent a lot of time in the swimming pool trying to stay coolish (the pool water itself would have hit 30C regularly); we also spent time in swimming lessons, diving competitions, doing swim survival badges and competing in school galas. Mum has started sending me some of the things that she kept from my childhood and I was surprised at the number of swim badges (that’s right, everything was recorded in those days including the first 100m swim, 500m etc. right up to 3000m which I apparently completed at the age of 7), first place certificates (more through the other swimmers not being fortunate enough to have their own swimming pools at home and swimming like “Eric the Eel” than any brilliance on my part) and medals that she had kept.

 

Having so little competition at a young age (other than from my older bro) led to me being pretty confident in my own ability and thinking I was a good swimmer for many a year. I ended up in Lanzarote (Canary Islands, just off Morocco) in 1998 training for an Ironman. I happened to ask one of the pro tri-athletes there by the name of Ben, who I worked with, to come down and give me some tips on swimming… I was 23 years old by this stage and training for my first ever triathlon. Although I thought he might help me improve a bit, in truth I thought I would impress the hell out of him. He asked me to swim a straight 2km so he could watch my stroke and when I got out the water 35mins later I was thinking “who’s your daddy, how good was that?”… At which point he said “Mate, that was so bad I’m not sure where to start!”.

 

I was crushed to say the least, but it was at this point I started learning how to swim and will ever be thankful to Ben for being so brutally honest. Without his help my day out in the Ironman a few months later would have been more hellish than it was… more about that when I’m old enough to tell you.

 

Outside of swimming we were fortunate enough to have parents that were sport nuts and wanted nothing more than the 3 of us to get involved. Looking around at kids nowadays I realise just how lucky we were to have parents like that and how much those early years still play such a major part in my life. I remember having tennis lessons for years (sometimes being forced to go even though we didn’t want to, although once we got there we loved it) and eventually playing in the under 8’s tournament against Zimbabwe… there was no money in any of the tennis clubs in Botswana but by this stage mum had set up an import\export company that went on to become the largest in Botswana before being bought out by a major South African company when we later moved to South Africa… I will never forget the name of the company, Capricorn Agencies (as we lived in the tropic of Capricorn), as once mum was making enough money she sponsored all the tournaments and made sure that everyone involved got trophies, prizes and Capricorn agencies T-shirts!

 

At this age, and for a fair few years to come, I may not have been the best loser, actually the term “a little shit!” would probably be more appropriate. Even at the age of 7 I ended up breaking a couple of my tennis rackets on the ground during competitions and could throw away an entire match by getting pissed off to the extent I couldn’t play a normal shot, I would have to slam every ball and keep getting angrier as it either hit the net or the back fence; it is a characteristic that stayed with me into my late teens. To this day I still have the same desire to compete although I have learnt over the years that the competing is the important part and sporting equipment is too expensive when I’m paying for it.

 

I remember liking one of the girls in the Zimbabwe tennis team and was really keen to impress her. On one of the competition days, while I was planning my move and how to be “the man”, one of my friends was stopping me from getting to the toilet and making me laugh any way he could… unfortunately, as I wasn’t going to fill out and put any real muscle on for at least another 10 years, he was big enough and strong enough to keep me pinned down until eventually I wet myself laughing. He then proceeded to go and tell everyone in the tournament that I had just wet myself and I got chased around by about 20 screaming kids who wanted proof… they finally caught me and she was in the group of 20. This may not have been the highlight of my tennis career but it certainly has stuck to this day!

 

Although Botswana would have seemed like paradise to my parents when they arrived, in reality it was just a dust bowl at the time. There were few paved roads in the town and even fewer amenities. Although there were a couple of play schools in town, the teachers at the play schools barely had an education above a play school level themselves which was a little scary as my parents wanted us to progress past playschool before we hit 15 years of age…  not to be put off, without any experience whatsoever, mum opened up her own play School and the three of us spent the next 4 years at home!

 

This would typify the next few years of mum’s life; if it wasn’t there or needed doing,   she would find a way to do it. Having left school at the age of 16 to go nursing, and having travelled around the world are so many years at an early age with her father who was in the British army visiting the colonies, Botswana was the perfect place for the entrepreneur that mum was already growing into. The play school soon became a place for the expatriate community to send their kids and became the premier play School in Botswana (not that hard I grant you, but it was a good start and kept the family occupied until we hit junior school).

 

It appeared at this time that mom was not the only person in the family that had an entrepreneurial streak running through her; the family found that out the hard way that I was a chip off the old entrepreneurial block when I decided to open up my own hairdressing salon at the play School (think Zohan without the skill).  My father’s boss, a complete wally, had a son at the play School who was the same age as me; I decided to take him behind the back of the house and give him a new look. It appears that those safety scissors that you give to kids in play school aren’t quite as safe as they might first appear! When the kid’s folks came by to pick up “tufty” (the poor little bugger looked like a tennis ball that had gone through a meat grinder) a little later, the mum burst into tears and my dad’s boss had a right go at him. Although I got a good telling off in front of the kid’s parents, I knew what I had done couldn’t have been that bad as my parents started wetting themselves laughing after the boss had left! That was my last attempt at hairdressing until I started shaving my own head 30 years later!

 

www.sportingconnections.com

Sunshine Coast-based adventure seeker Oscar Boult launched the sports networking

website, www.sportingconnections.com  and it already looks set to keep pace with the online trend made popular by Myspace and Facebook.

 

Tapping into our nature for mateship and our reputation as ‘the great sporting nation’, the website attracted more than 1500 members in its first month, making it one of the fastest growing sites in the world. It seems funny that no-one has thought of the idea before now, but Oscar says while he has travelled the world making new mates, it wasn’t until he was a newcomer to the Sunshine Coast in 2006 that he had the brainwave for a website connecting sportspeople. “I was driving back to Brisbane for a round of golf with friends thinking ‘there must be a better way to meet people’ and the idea of a purpose-driven website specifically designed to connect sporty types just evolved from there.” 

 

The rugged looking South African spent 13 years criss-crossing the globe in search of the next great adrenalin rush and found himself competing in the local Ironman event in Switzerland, hitting the ski slopes in Europe and diving from a yacht in the Caribbean. He has tried just about all of the 60 sports on his site. “Offering all sports in all countries globally, the website connects amateurs and professionals alike, from clubs and teams, coaches and trainers to individuals seeking play-buddies,” Oscar explains. “You can also set up games or training sessions, create new teams, chat in forums, or get-together to watch sporting events.”

Easy and free to use, there are already 100 international events listed. Members can submit events searchable by sport, date and distance. “The Event listings range from someone wanting to throw a ball around at their local beach or park on a weekend to pro-events like the Geneva Marathon,” Oscar said. Seems getting out and creating your own fun with like-minds this summer just got easier. Simply log on, search for players, drop them a line and go. www.sportingconnections.com            

After a month on a passenger liner with mum dealing with a couple of little brats trying to fling themselves overboard, the family arrived in Cape Town and, after disembarking and going through the usual hassle of customs, we jumped on the next train bound for Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, our home for the next 12 years.

 

Botswana was an amazing place to grow up and was (and still is) one of the few success stories in Africa. They had\have a strong economy, a peaceful culture, and are proud owners of the richest diamond mine in the world (http://www.khulsey.com/jewelry/diamond_mines_botswana.html). The Africans in Botswana are very different to the rest of Africa in that they have always been a peace-loving and relaxed culture (with the odd bit of witch-doctoring here and there). Compare this to their neighbour South Africa (where we moved to from Botswana later on) where the Xhosa’s and Zulus have been fighting for hundreds of years and still continue to slaughter each other to this day; or to Zimbabwe, another neighbour, where the country lies in ruin under a mad dictator, and you will realise just what a gem of a place Botswana actually is… a real diamond in the rough so to speak.

 

The other amazing thing about Botswana is the weather: if you want summer year round then this is the place to be. The average temperature in summer sits around 40-44 Celsius; I remember spending entire days in the swimming pool when it got up into the 50’s on occasion. I am not sure growing up in this sort of heat was conducive to comfortable living when I moved over to the UK in later years when I often thought I would freeze to death while half the people around me were wearing T-shirts. On the other hand, when it comes to doing sport in the heat, I love it; it seems that the hotter it gets the more of an advantage I have over my fellow competitors who seems to die once temps hit the 30’s… and once it gets over 40C I am in my element!

 

Our first house in Botswana was a comparative mansion to where we had been living in the UK; it had two bedrooms, a study (later converted to a third bedroom upon the arrival of my younger brother, Conrad, 4 years later), a kitchen and separate lounge, and a plot of land that contained… dust! But to my folks it was a real start at a new life and after the row upon row of council housing that they had just left, the open space of Africa seemed like another planet. Oh yes, we also had 2 maids thrown into the deal which took mum a bit of getting used to; I will never forget them as they became my two African mothers, Elda and Rebecca; the patience of these two lovely women was astounding as both myself and my brother are headstrong little buggers at the best of times and no doubt we must have pushed the boundaries at times. But in the years that they brought us up I never remember them for anything more than their beautiful smiles and constant support.

 

To be continued… www.sportingconnections.com

My first memories seem to be of watching my father, wearing a white rugby jersey, crunching someone in a tackle into touch (out of the field of play for the non-rugby playing fraternity) on a dusty field in Botswana, just north of South Africa.

My second memory is that I wanted to be big and muscular, pretty unfortunate really when I was nick-named “Billy Bunter” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bunter) by my parents owing to my skinny legs and huge stomach as a baby; actually, til I was about 7 years old to be honest. Fortunately my huge stomach disappeared at some stage in my childhood and then I was just skinny without the stomach!

 

But back to the very beginning; I was born in Greenwich, London in October of 1974 to Pauline and Neil Boult, a couple of youngsters living in council housing struggling to make ends meet. My mum was a nurse, just getting over having my older brother 18 months previously, and my father a computer programmer working for the local council. My brother, Oliver (who I never got along with until a couple of years ago), was to play a big part in my desire to compete at everything that I came across for the rest of my life, from tiddlywinks to triathlon… but more about that later.

 

My mum had a really tough upbringing; travelling around the world with her Father (who was in the British army, a nasty abusive bugger) and an Irish Catholic mother who would have won the gold medal in consecutive Olympics had the “placing guilt” event ever made the starting line-up! Mum’s upbringing would have a major impact on the family as a whole and a lot the decisions she made throughout the course of our lives can be traced back to her childhood.

 

Mum was my hero growing up and is now my best friend and confidant; without her support I don’t think I would have achieved a lot of what I did. A defining moment later in my life was having her there at the finish line as I completed my first (and so far only) Ironman event in Switzerland in ’98, a memory I will always cherish… she also had to help me walk up and down the stairs to the apartment we had rented in Zurich for the next 4 days when my hips and knees felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to them!

 

With her background of travelling the world as a youngster, mum was aware that there was more to life than a crappy council house in London trying to keep the heating going; she started looking at newspapers for jobs around the world and one day saw an advert that had been posted by the Botswana government. They were looking for programmers for some new systems they were putting in and, after applying on my dad’s behalf, he got the job. So, at 9 months old, I was bundled up with the rest of their belongings and they got on the next boat leaving from London to Africa. To think if she hadn’t been brave enough to make this decision I could have grown up in London and been a “proppa geeza, innit!”.

 

To Africa and beyond… To be continued.

Some people are extraordinary athletes and excel beyond all others (Lance Armstrong springs to mind), others are extraordinarily bad athletes but become famous nonetheless (Eric “the eel” Moussambani from Guinea, the world’s slowest Olympic swimmer)… And then there are the rest of us; I’m one of them, the rest of us!

Several people I have met over the years have suggested that I get my life story down in writing and I finally have the inclination to do so. I ask myself what I hope to achieve by doing this and the first thing that springs to mind is inspiration; if this story inspires even one person to get out there and try something new, to face up to a challenge they have been considering, or even to go for a walk, then I will feel like I have achieved something amazing.

The other reason, which is not quite so spiritual or exciting, is that I have the world’s crappest memory and thought it would be a good time to piece my life together… although this would sound ridiculous to most people, I am going to have to get my passport out once I get to age 18 in order to work out the where, what and how of my life up until today, age 33 and 3 quarters (for the more star struck amongst you I am a Libra).

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Oscar Boult, the guy who started www.sportingconnections.com! This is my life story. I have no idea how long it is going to take, no plan for it other than to tell the truth (I haven’t told anyone some of these stories, even my closest friends) and to find a way to dredge up the memories! Thank you for joining me for the ride!

Hi All

I have decided to write my life story out on the portal page of http://www.sportingconnections.com/component/option,com_portal/Itemid,67/ and will be updating my blog as I do so with each update 

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/u22fvqw2h3” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

I just joined up with Technorati to see how it works, let’s give this a try:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/u22fvqw2h3” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>