What about the Brownlee brothers, perhaps the greatest sibling pairing to have ever competed in any sport? Would Button have just swept past them in the qualifying stakes if he had, after all, decided to give the Olympic Games a go?

They may as well have put: "Jenson Button considered settling for Olympic gold medal when F1 seat was under threat".

As the article then explains, Button, for long a fairly serious amateur triathlete who placed 11th out of over 1,600 entrants in an Ironman race in the Philippines last year, did not share this view. He admitted that he was "way too old" and "anyone at the top of their game as a professional is at a completely different level".

Yet that is not the impression given by the headline.

Over the weekend, the newspapers were at it again when Britain's double Olympic gold medal winning track cyclist Victoria Pendleton revealed she is training to become a jump jockey. She is hoping to compete at the 2016 Cheltenham Festival, claimed one, while another decided the Grand National - the biggest single race in the sport - is a future aim.

Jenson Button is a major Formula One star but seems unlikely to have had any chance of competing at Rio 2016. in any sport ©Getty Images



This all got me thinking about athletes who have successfully switched from one sport to another.

A quick google search brings up numerous example, but most are, like Button and Pendleton, athletes who have excelled in one sport who attempted to switch to another late on in their career, amid the inevitable media hype. Most of them failed miserably.

Andrew Flintoff, the England cricketer who made a brief attempt at professional boxing, is one example, while a more noteworthy one is former French international goalkeeper Fabian Barthez, who finished 29th in last year's Le Mans 24-hour motor-racing contest. The most famous instance involved Michael Jordan, the US basketball superstar who signed a brief, and unsuccessful, minor league baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox in 1994.

There was many example of multi-sport medallists in the Paralympic Movement, with International Paralympic Committee President Sir Philip Craven even a former wheelchair basketball player who also dabbled in athletics and swimming. But with all due respect to Paralympians, the standard and relative lack of depth in each classification event means that this is much easier.

In some, there may only be a handful of athletes around the world competing at the top-level and this is different to the situation in any Olympic discipline.

Michael Jordan was one athlete for whom a switch of sports ultimately proved unsuccessful ©AFP/Getty Images



A total of 82 athletes have won Olympic medals across two different sports. Most of these can be put in one of two categories. They either moved between two very similar disciplines or they competed long ago in the first 50 years or so of the Modern Games.

The list is full of those who shifted between events like bobsleigh and luge, cross-country skiing and biathlon, indoor and beach volleyball, and swimming and water polo. Sports which, to a large extent, require the same skill-sets and training.

Even Lauryn Williams, the London 2012 4x100 metres relay athletics champion who two years later took two-person bobsleigh silver at Sochi 2014 was essentially using the same skill of sprinter. She powered the sled to the best possible start before team mate Elana Meyers controlled it.

Further back in time there was much more shifting around in sports, primarily because the depth and professionalism required was far less than it is now. My Grandfather talks in glowing terms about the Compton brothers, Denis and Leslie, in the 1930s and 1940s, who each  terrorised defences playing football for Arsenal in winter before striking similar fear into bowling attacks playing cricket for England and Middlesex in the summer.

Going back further still, the most famous example would be Jim Thorpe, the American, who won decathlon and pentathlon titles at the Stockholm 1912 Olympics before competing professionally in American football, baseball and basketball. He was stripped of his Olympic titles for violating the amateurism rules then in place, before the International Olympic Committee posthumously re-awarded them to him 30 years after his death in 1983.

Jim Thorpe, pictured competing at Stockholm 1912, is one of the most versatile athletes in sporting history ©Hulton Archive/Getty Images







In terms of athletes who have successfully switched in more recent years, Canadian Clara Hughes won two bronze medals in road cycling events at Atlanta 1996 before switching to speed skating in time to win the 5,000m title at Turin 2006. Similarly, Britain's Rebecca Romero won a World Championship gold and an Athens 2004 Olympic silver in rowing before switching to the velodrome in time to win the Beijing 2008 Olympic individual pursuit event.

Yet speed skating, cycling and rowing are still close enough to allow a switch and there are few other examples. It is impossible to imagine anyone being able to get remotely close to the level of versatility pulled off by the likes of Jim Thorpe today.

But why?

The obvious reason is the standard and levels of dedication required to reach the top in any one sport, with the professional elite producing a different stratosphere of performance to amateur level participants.

So while you still get youngsters who perhaps have the potential to thrive in more than one sport - like English football's most famous brothers Gary and Philip Neville, who were promising cricketers in their schoolboy days before opting for the glamour of Manchester United and the Premier League - it is impossible to put in the dedication and training to make the jump to the professional ranks in more than one event.

In Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, written by table tennis player turned journalist Matthew Syed, it is claimed that over 10,000 hours of top-level practice is required to reach the top in any field. Those that do so, in musical and artistic as well as sporting arenas, are those that have the best opportunities to train hard and learn from best rather than those who are the most talented.

Read almost any autobiography of a top athlete, from Michael Phelps to Cristiano Ronaldo, and this will be apparent.

One interesting example is disgraced cycling Lance Armstrong. After retiring from cycling for the first time in 2005, the American, who started out as a triathlete lest we forget, ran a series of marathons, producing a best time of 2 hours 46min 43sec. Although a strong time for an average person, for someone who won seven times what's generally seen as the toughest endurance event in sport - albeit with substantial chemical help - that time does not appear too quick.

Lance Armstrong proved good, but still 40 minutes off world record pace, when he focused on marathon running instead of cycling ©Getty Images



And although another athlete might have that physical capacity to excel in two, there is also the tactical and mental side which is just as important and difficult to master.

This was something raised by jockey Sam Waley-Cohen when asked about the prospects of Victoria Pendleton excelling in horse-racing. "The big difference [between cycling and racing] is that a horse can think for itself and a bike doesn't," he said.

Obvious, maybe, but also very true.

"Victoria is very fit and has the natural attributes which will stand her in good stead," he continued. "But there is a big step up, even from just being a horsey person to racing competitively. Most of all, you need to be mentally tough enough to take the falls, because there will be plenty."

In a sport like Syed's table tennis, it is likely that if a top player switched and attempted to play with the wrong hand, even if he had no experience playing with that hand, he would still beat a non-player because he would have the nous to know what to do to get the better of his opponent, even if he could not utilise his usual repertoire of expertly honed strokes.

So this experience and judgement, along with the 10,000 hours plus of training, is key, and explains why - unless in broadly similar disciplines - an athlete like Jenson Button could not successful switch to Olympic level in a second sport.

And of course, that table tennis comparison is not actually valid because a top player would practise with both hands just in case it proved handy in a match scenario .

They would have prepared for every eventuality, and it is a pity some tabloid sub-editors do not always have the same attention to detail.