"Born in 1855 as William Grenfell, [Lord] Desborough was a cricket and soccer star at Harrow, where he set a school mile record that stood for sixty-one years. At Oxford he was president of athletics and the boat club and rowed number four in the famous 1877 boat race, the only one to end in a dead heat.
He was punting champion of Great Britain three years in succession, sculled from Oxford to Putney, 105 miles, in a day; stroked an eight across the English Channel; and fenced for Britain in the 1906 Olympics at the age of fifty, winning a silver medal.
He climbed extensively in the Alps, including three successful assaults on the Matterhorn, by three different routes; went big-game hunting in India and shooting in the Rocky Mountains. In one season's stalking in Scotland, he bagged a hundred stags, and during three weeks' fishing in Florida caught a hundred tarpon.
He twice swam Niagara falls, the second time in heavy hail and snow. As the Daily Telegraph's war correspondent in the Sudan in 1888, he once confronted the dervishes alone, armed only with an umbrella." - By The Sword, Richard Cohen
I have more respect for a man who lived through school called Randy Bumgardner.
