Top Five: Radical Body Transformations

On Friday Ricky Hatton announced his return to the ring; hardly earth-shattering news considering he has shed three stone over the past year since ballooning after ‘retirement’. His ability to rocket up numerous weight divisions after a bout is the stuff of legend, as is his ability to drop the pies and a few layers of blubber in the process when he fancies a scrap.

In recognition of the oscillating Manc, I’ve compiled a little list of people whose body transformations have dropped jaws across the globe. I’m staying away from the Marie Claire-style makeover approach, and we can also pretty much take Michael Jackson as read…

Christian Bale

In order to play a chronic insomniac in The Machinist in 2004, Bale decided to drop as much weight as he could without dying. His obsessive nature took him way beyond the expectations of director Brad Anderson; he ended up losing five stone and resembling a heroin addict with a pre-existing eating disorder. How did he manage to drop such a substantial amount of weight? What tailor-made, medically monitored method did he use? Always a man to do things on his own terms, Bale used his own sophisticated approach of only eating when he felt ready to collapse and running for hours at a time.

In fact, five months after filming for The Machinist, Bale performed an even bigger full body transplant by gaining seven and a half stone within five months to bulk up for Batman Begins. Coming from a man who said ‘working out is incredibly boring’, he stuck to the task pretty admirably when inflating himself into Bruce Wayne shape. Interestingly, Bale said that while emaciated, he felt ‘calm and serene’ compared to the ‘big mood swings’ he experienced as a beefcake Batman. We can probably imagine which version of Bale on-set lighting engineers prefer.

Jodie Marsh

Life was becoming increasingly hard for Jodie ‘Look at me!!!’ Marsh and by 2006, after being evicted from Big Brother, she even seriously contemplated suicide by driving into a tree. Well, happily she’s now turned her life around, by making a spectacle of herself in a more legitimate way: becoming a bodybuilder. A diet of eggs, eggs and eggs combined with up to four hours a day at the gym and a shit-load of fake tan (applied nearly to the point of causing racial offence) has taken her to the heights of victory at the International Natural Bodybuilding Federation championships in Washington DC. Throughout her physical transformation, one important part of her body has remained the same: her heart. Just joking. Her breasts. Her breasts have remained the same.

Carrot Top

Achieving some success in the late 80s and 90s as a rake-like flame-haired comedian using a suitcase full of props for his ‘unique’ brand of humour, Scott ‘Carrot Top’ Thompson soon disappeared from the edges of fame into anonymity. He tried his hand at acting in a series of straight-to-DVD-bargain-bin films, but for some reason it never quite worked out for him. So he decided to work out for him. Totally not using steroids, Mr Top gradually built his way up from an eccentric- but human- looking nerd to an obscene image of vascularity.

Not content with only one form of physical reconstruction, his face has also gone through a disturbing metamorphosis. He has raised eyebrows in more way than one, as his default facial expression has now been set to ‘surprised’ by the wonders of Botox. Regardless of what anyone may think of him, he’s certainly managed to harness his natural uniqueness to unsurpassed proportions; he’s hardly likely to merge into the background in a police line-up.

Diego Maradona

A man who needs no introduction, Maradona’s natural inclination towards the finer things in life- cocaine, booze, hog roasts and the like- took him to nearly 20 stone at the age of 44 (a feat inevitably awaiting Ryan Giggs). In 2005, Colombian doctors performed a gastric bypass on the footballing legend-turned-giant-football, who practically halved overnight. By the looks of his bare ankles and forearms as he flapped around the dugout at the 2010 World Cup, Maradona celebrated his surgery by buying a new suit, and never bought a larger one as he gradually re-inflated. He’s levelled out a little over the past couple of years, and is now back in Argentina at his spiritual home, hanging out the terraces at Boca Juniors, after being sacked by Dubai club Al Wasl FC for predictably showing no interest or ability in actually doing his job.

Lana Wachowski

In compiling a ‘top 5’ list of people, it’s rare you can include four men and two women. Larry Wachowski, as she was known up to ten years ago, was always known as one of the two Wachowski brothers, who directed the Matrix films and V For Vendetta. Lana went her whole life feeling like she was trapped in the wrong body suit, and after years of trepidation about her family’s reaction, decided to take the giant leap and announce herself as a woman to her parents in 2002. Wachowski recently told the New Yorker magazine that her mother’s perplexed response was ‘But I was there when you were born’.  Her family have all been resolutely supportive though, and Lana said because of this, ‘everything else has been a piece of cake’.

As is her right, she likes to keep details of her anatomy and any surgery she has undertaken very sketchy. After divorcing her first wife in 2003 for a blonde dominatrix called Ilsa Stix (as you do), Lana has since married her second wife in 2009. Larry must therefore have endured the presumably confusing experience of being a lesbian trapped in a man’s body; something that will always bring the amazing Mr Garrison from South Park to mind.

The Oparalympics Debate

The Paralympics are now in full swing: wheelchairs are smashing into each other like demolition derby, double leg amputee swimmers are obliterating my personal best times and Claire Balding has resumed her position right up in everyone’s grill. There is, though, more on-going debate surrounding the nature of the Games, particularly its exact purpose and identity, in comparison to the Olympics once it had gotten underway. Indeed, part of the discussion revolves around whether there’s any value in comparing the two events. Either way, the debate seems entirely healthy to me, as it’s an indication that, like a neurotic teenager (or ‘teenager’) the relatively new event is still growing and trying to figure out what it’s supposed to be. In One Tree Hill terms, the Paralympics is currently leaning against a palm tree, broodily gazing into the hazy sunset. Should it ask the Olympics out to the prom or go proudly its own way and arrive stag in its uncle’s motorbike?Clearly, the Paralympics are bigger and better than ever before. It’s likely to be the first to fully sell out; it’s being broadcast to over a hundred countries, and involves athletes representing a record 164 nations (eighteen more than in Beijing). There do remain some slight flaws in the competition though. Firstly, for an event that centres on promoting equality and displaying the potential of human achievement if given the opportunity, it’s a shame that poorer countries are so underrepresented. Cambodia, for instance, has one of the world’s highest ratios of amputees due to landmine explosions, but has only one wildcard entry for London. In Beijing, 51 per cent of competing athletes came from only nine countries. Although this stat has improved in London, with 40 per cent representing from the big nine, there’s still a long way to go.

Cambodian athletes constrained by their equipment

...in the paraphrased words of all reasonable humans across the world, Atos really should go f*ck themselves

Another problem that faces the Paralympics is the scheduling. The Olympics catches the summer break nicely (in all northern hemisphere countries that is), meaning that other than cricket (which, let’s be honest, we weren’t going to watch anyway), there’s little to contend with for sporting attention. The Paralympics currently takes place just after most major domestic football leagues- including the world’s most watched, the English Premier League- have resumed. In this country at least it means all us football fans have our heads stuck firmly in our brand new fantasy league teams (with one eye on the real-life team we actually support), with little time to spare for our loved ones, let alone other sporting events.

Furthermore, in the paraphrased words of all reasonable humans across the world, Atos really should go fuck themselves. As in, literally, there would be an overall net gain of well-being if each Atos member of staff were to spend their working hours genuinely attempting to have intercourse with themselves rather than metaphorically fucking the UK’s sizeable disabled population. How a company using biased interviews designed at forcing people off their benefits could ever even be considered as official partners of the Paralympics is beyond me. You may have read it all before but it’s worth reading again, such is the horror of it: around 70 per cent of people who appeal after being deemed fit to work by an Atos medical professional are successful in their appeal. Equally guilty of hypocrisy the moment he opens his mouth to promote anything resembling improvement in the lives of people with disabilities is David Cameron, who along with Ian Duncan Smith and George Osborne set the targets for Atos to work to. The latter’s reception at the Olympic Park on Monday provided a good spontaneous opinion poll for around 80,000 people at least. 

Others, though, argue that a merge (with the Olympic) would create a greater sense of equality and integration for the Paralympics

 Now that I’ve stepped off my high horse (it’s so cold and scary down here), I can return to the primary question at hand. Should the Paralympics remain a distinct event, or merge with the Olympics?

At the moment the Paralympics lie in a slightly awkward middle ground between total independence and complete integration with the Olympics, meaning it unfortunately runs the risk of maintaining secondary status. Pretty much like Scotland, opinion is divided about the issue of independence. A BBC World Service survey in March found that out of 10,000 people asked across nineteen countries, 43 per cent wanted the Paralympics to remain separate and 47 per cent wanted the two -lympics to merge. Out of the remaining 10 per cent, 6 per cent felt the issue was too complex to decide and 4 per cent couldn’t give a shit and wanted those twenty minutes back. (These statistics are 90 per cent accurate).

There are some who feel that the best way to promote and showcase the physical heights people with disabilities can achieve is to keep the Paralympics separate, creating more of an identity for the Games and providing worldwide focus. This school of thought also holds that were there to be a merge, it would actually turn into more of an acquisition, as the Paralympics would play second fiddle to the Olympics. Others, though, argue that a merge would create a greater sense of equality and integration for the Paralympics. International Paralympic Committee President Sir Phillip Craven (who’s opening ceremony speech was far less sleep-inducing than Jacques Rogge’s effort a month ago) acknowledges that it may be on the cards in future Games, although no sooner than 2024.

...we were treated to watching John Snow and Krishna Guru-Murthy over-politicise everything - referring to famine at least twenty times 

There is, though, also the practical issue that in order to accommodate all of the classifications- T43 (and other Terminator models), S8, C3PO and the like- the ‘Oparalympics’ would have to last up to a month. Imagine having to ‘work’ from home for a whole month?! Awful. One option would be to down-scale the number of Paralympic events, but that would seem to undermine the whole inclusive purpose of the competition.

Channel 4 have their best man on the case

So what about keeping the two Games distinct? Having opening and closing ceremonies for both, for instance, clearly distinguishes the events from each other, providing a platform to build anticipation and then celebrate to the sound of tone-deaf burnt out ex-rock and pop stars. Aptly, at London 2012 for the first time, UK television rights went out to tender for the Paralympics, which Channel 4 won (before remembering that it didn’t have any sports presenters other than eccentric horse riding pundit John McCririck , who would be guaranteed to make a string of highly offensive comments), creating further separation between the two Games. Rather than watching BBC’s Gary Lineker pun-tificate his way through proceedings, we were treated to watching John Snow and Krishna Guru-Murthy over-politicise everything - referring to famine at least twenty times - and give guests the unexpected grilling of a lifetime during the opening ceremony.

I’m going to reserve opinion and allow myself the luxury of just sitting back and enjoying the show

For me, further developing the Paralympics as an independent, worldwide sporting spectacle in its own right is the way to go for the moment. Given the scheduling issues previously mentioned though, my partially informed and inevitably flawed suggestion is that the Paralympics and Olympics should simply be swapped around. Doing so would make a clear statement about how seriously the Paralympics are taken, allowing it to gain much needed exposure during the summer break, while also giving the host city a chance to prepare for the even larger Olympics crowds.

For the remaining duration of the Games though, I’m going to reserve opinion and allow myself the luxury of just sitting back and enjoying the show… while tweeting snarky comments about Channel 4’s coverage obviously- I need some outlet.