Are modern sports stars still cut out for pantomime season? Oh yes they are | Emma John

Merry Betwixtmas, everybody! I’ve a great fondness for this final stretch of December, the weird dead time when Boxing Day obligations to extended family have been fulfilled, and the new year’s party still seems impossibly far in the future. It’s a truly philosophical period, raising questions of mortality, renewal and resolution, and of how long trifle can be left open before it goes off. It’s good for a couple more days, right?

You don’t want to go back to work, but you’re also not exactly sure what to do with yourself. Which is, doubtless, why panto exists. This is no slight on the genre, for which I have great respect – the best money my sister ever earned from her acting career was in Aladdin, singing A Whole New World while desperately clinging to a shonky hand-operated flying carpet. Still, there must be a reason people don’t pay to shout “He’s behind you!” any other time of year.

The tradition of sporting stars treading the boards alongside stalwart Rada-educated veterans has dropped off in recent years – ever since Strictly came along with its bedazzled leotards and its ability to turn Darren Gough’s delivery stride into a passable paso doble. Television reality shows have come to cannibalise the Christmas market in oven-ready athletes, whether it is exiling Frankie Dettori and Fatima Whitbread to the jungle or putting Anton Ferdinand and Ricky Hatton on ice.

Thank heavens, then, for Louis Smith, who appears to be the only athlete prepared to don the leggings in 2024. This is the former gymnast’s second year of panto, although he had turned down a number of previous offers because, as he says, “I didn’t feel like I had the confidence or the skillset to do it as competently as I wanted to.” After performing in two West End musicals, he felt ready to step up to the big leagues: this year he graduated from villain to hero, and is apparently “looking forward to tapping into a new streak of performance”.

Is our Olympic multi-medallist the only athlete taking the art of pantomime seriously? Are we witnessing the end of an era? Consider everything British sport has contributed to the art form – Peter Beardsley’s “captivating performance” in Sleeping Beauty, Tessa Sanderson’s Girl Friday in Robinson Crusoe, and Kriss Akabusi’s genre-defying role “as Himself” in Dick Whittington. The new generation of athletes’ reluctance to continue their legacy is, surely, a travesty.

I do hope Lord Botham will have strong words to say about it in the House of Lords. If only Britain had parted ways with the EU sooner, we might have stopped this nation’s great cultural decline. It is not like we have a shortage of sporting dames. Think of the comic gold to be mined from the misunderstandings! Do Laura Kenny and Ellen MacArthur not know what a gift they are wasting?

But no, instead of locking herself in for a season at the Crewe Lyceum, Sarah Storey took her 30 Paralympic medals off to the ice rink – only to fracture her ankle in pre-show training. At least Dame Kelly Holmes has had the sense to optimise her title, using it in full on the poster for last year’s Goldilocks in Plymouth.

It is not only primetime telly that is stealing our potential panto stars, by the way. Some of them are running off to join the circus instead. Where once a world champion gymnast, diver, figure skater or even synchronised swimmer might have made a natural principal boy in Peter Pan, there is now a far longer-term stage career for them at Cirque du Soleil, which has 77 world-class athletes on their books (40% of their cast come from a sporting background). The British Olympians Terry Bartlett, Lee Brearley and Marissa King all tour the world with their shows – and Bryony Page, who won trampolining gold in Paris, wants to join them.

A second act in the performing arts does seem a perfect fit for the ebullient 34-year-old whose reaction on realising she had won a medal at her third consecutive Olympics was the most adorably giddy of the Games. If you missed it, go back and check out the clip – on seeing her scores, Page leaps up and immediately drops to the floor, straight out of the camera frame. Ironically, she had not even secured gold at this point – there was still one more competitor left to perform, but Page had temporarily forgotten that in the excitement.

The circus remains on hold while she gears herself towards a defence of her Olympic title in LA in 2028, but it must be good for her to know her skills are so transferable, like the British silver-medal canoeist running a “breathwork academy”, or the swimmers and divers posting on OnlyFans. Those options were not available to Gareth Chilcott in 1993, when the rugby union prop signed off his playing career and headed straight to the Theatre Royal Bath for a stint as a henchman in Cinderella.

Chilcott pointed out at the time that he was merely swapping “from one form of entertainment to another” – he did another two seasons, working alongside everyone from Keith Chegwin and Gloria Hunniford and Lesley Joseph and Sooty. He never had quite the same rapport with Sooty as Frank Bruno – but then, the boxer and the bear did work together for more than a decade.

This year we lost one of the greatest sportsmen ever to cry fee-fi-fo-fum – Geoff Capes, who put some of his best years on the festive stage. It’s amazing to think a former shot putter once used to knock The Chuckle Brothers down to second billing – perhaps professional sport just does not make ’em like they used to.