The Doctor's Sporting Skills!
The Doctor Who Team
The Doctor loves the Olympics - so much in fact, that he watched the 1948 Games twice! And he even got to carry the Olympic torch at London 2012 - all the way back in 2006. Although the Doctor doesn’t always seem like a natural sportsman, he has over the centuries thrown his hat into the ring and participated in a number of sports and games.
So, as the 2016 Olympics kick off, here’s our guide to the Doctor’s sporting prowess…
Archery
The Doctor first showed off his archery skills in the Fourth Doctor adventure The Face of Evil, when he used a crossbow to shoot through a rope and save himself from a Sevateem trap. When Leela enquired on where he learned to shoot like that, the Doctor replied “In Switzerland. Charming man. William Tell, he was called.”
In Robot of Sherwood, the Twelfth Doctor, fuelled by bravado, cut in on an archery contest between the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood. After the Doctor ‘won’, he and Robin continued to engage in a game of one-upmanship, with both archers demonstrating immense skill before they were arrested by the Sheriff’s robotic guards.
Unfortunately the Doctor was later forced to admit he’d cheated, using a special arrow with a homing device… Maybe William Tell’s tutelage wasn’t that great after all?
Cricket
Cricket = Fifth Doctor. Simple as that. No other Doctor was as associated with a sport as Five and cricket. In fact, he loved it so much that his outfit of choice was basically a set of cricket whites!
The Doctor was (happily) roped into playing a match in Black Orchid, where he showed off his skills and won the game in style for Cranleigh. He’d also usually have a cricket ball tucked away in his pocket, and it came in handy in Four to Doomsday when he needed that extra bit of momentum to propel him from the Urbankan spaceship to the TARDIS! And the Tenth Doctor (disguised as John Smith) bowled a brilliant ball to save a mother and her child from a falling piano in Human Nature.
Venusian Aikido
Ok, so if cricket makes you think of the Fifth Doctor, then Venusian Aikido should conjure up velvet suits, bouffant hair and a yellow car named Bessie! The Third Doctor was a Doctor of action, never shying away from a good car chase or swordfight with his best frenemy, so it made sense that he was a skilled martial artist, too! He’d often face his enemies in hand-to-hand combat, choosing to subdue them or render them unconscious, rather than the more deadly, weapons-based methods of UNIT and the Brigadier.
Football
In The Lodger, the Eleventh Doctor was trying his best to be a ’normal bloke’, so when his new flat mate, Craig, asked if he could make up the numbers for a pub league football team, he agreed. He thought he was good at football, although he didn’t seem 100% sure which sport football was. But it turned out he was right! He scored a number of goals and was instrumental in the King’s Arms’ victory.
Chess
We’ve seen the Third, Fourth, Seventh and Eleventh Doctors dabble with chess – sometimes to simply pass the time and sometimes to cunningly gain a tactical advantage over an adversary. Most recently the Eleventh Doctor showed a penchant for the game. In Nightmare in Silver, the Cybermen attempted to upload and incorporate the Doctor as a Cyber-Planner. While fighting the Cyber-Planner within his own head for control of his brain, the Doctor suggested a game of chess – winner take all. But the game was just a distraction, buying the Doctor just enough time to modify an anti-cyber hand-pulse, apply it to his cyber circuitry and eliminate any trace of the Cyber-Planner from his mind!
The Eleventh Doctor was also remarkably adept at live chess – a variant of the game where the pieces were electrified, the voltage increasing with each move. In The Wedding of River Song, the Doctor played a match against Gantok. He expertly outwitted his opponent until Gantok’s only possible option was to move his queen, now charged with 4 million volts, which would certainly result in death! The Doctor was however playing for higher stakes, and agreed to concede the game in exchange for information on the whereabouts of Dorium Maldovar… Checkmate!
