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March 6, 2026
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Someone asked me recently, at a dinner in Andorra that had gone on slightly too long, what I thought made Muhammad Ali the greatest athlete of all time.
I said: everything. He won the argument before you finished asking the question.
Three-time world heavyweight champion. Olympic gold. Refused Vietnam and lost his title for it. Spoke at rallies. Visited refugee camps. Wrote poetry. Was genuinely funny. The man performed in every arena simultaneously and didn't embarrass himself in any of them.
Which is, when you think about it, his greatest crime against the rest of us.
The Ali Paradox is simple: he set the bar so impossibly high — athlete, activist, poet, statesman, all at once — and we never lowered it. We just started expecting everyone else to clear it.
After I won the Olympics in 2008, a garden and home magazine asked me for my top five gardening tips.
I want to be clear: I had fake grass at the time. And pebbles. Deliberately. Because I had no interest in, or aptitude for, anything that grows. But I had won a two-hour sweatfest in Beijing, so apparently that qualified me to advise on seasonal planting.
I genuinely cannot remember what I told them. Something was printed. Somewhere, someone may have killed a plant based on my guidance. I am sorry for that.
The assumption underneath the request is somewhat ridiculous. That excellence in one arena must translate to competence in all of them. That a champion, by definition, has sorted everything out.
The US men's ice hockey team just found this out. They won Olympic gold, their first since 1980, and within 48 hours were in a full press conference cycle, not about the win, but about laughing at a locker room speakerphone joke about the women's team. Likely a few beers in with the president of the United States on the other end of the line. Gold medals around their necks.
You can have opinions about whether they should have known better. I think they probably should have. But what we were actually demanding in that moment was Ali-level composure. Real-time political awareness, at the peak of their lives, in a room designed for celebration.
I met Angela Merkel once. The Chancellor of Germany, at the time arguably the most powerful person in Europe. She said hello to me.
I said nothing. Completely blank.
A man who had stood on Olympic podiums and Ironman finish lines and spoken in front of thousands of people. Total system failure. I couldn’t get a word out.
She moved on with visible grace. I stood there for what felt like a fortnight.
Had there been a camera, my mother would have rightfully smacked me. Politely, but firmly.
The point is: it doesn't matter how many arenas you've conquered. A new one will always find the gap.
No, Ali didn't stumble into that. He built his voice and presence over years, at enormous personal cost. The FBI surveilled him. He had his boxing licence stripped. He couldn't fight professionally in the United States for three years during his prime.
We've since turned him into a wallpaper quote and a casual benchmark for hockey players on speakerphone.
Ali is the only true GOAT of any sport, in any era, by any measure. Athletic, cultural, moral, linguistic. No debate. No close second.
Being measured against him is fine by me. The man earned it. There is something almost flattering about the paradox — at least the bar exists, at least we know what complete looks like.
The problem is only when we forget it was built by one person, once, under circumstances none of us would choose. Most of us are still working on the one thing.
He would have had a poem ready for that moment with Merkel.
Which, once again, is exactly the problem.
Signing off for the weekend,
Jan.
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