JUST recently The Press sportsdesk featured the exciting exertions of women’s cyclist Iona Sewell after the Fangfoss speedster won the Tour of Malta in her second year of competitive cycling and just 12 months on from finishing third in the same muscle-sapping event.

The 22-year-old princess of the pedals revealed how she initially started out in competitive sport as an oarswoman with York City Rowing Club. When success eluded her on the water, she turned to cycling and discovered her true metier on the road since when she has not looked back.

While some may find such a transition unlikely she revealed there was a kind of shared dynamic between the contrasting sports of rowing and cycling. A previous and more high-profile example is to be found in the glittering career of Britain’s Rebecca Romero.

After sampling Olympic Games success on the water with a silver medal in the women’s quad sculls in Athens in 2004 with a world title success the year after, Romero then saddled up for cycling and was the three kilometres individual gold medal-winner in the 2008 Olympiad in Beijing as well as also winning two world cycling crowns the same year.

That crowned her as the first woman in British history to have won medals in two different sports in two different summer Olympics.

Besides the obvious attribute of latent talent, both rowing and cycling also share basic requisites such as stamina, speed, power, endurance and endeavour.

They are all qualities that can be associated with the majority of sports, though perhaps not snooker and darts, ahem. However, would certain sports also benefit from a closer association?

It might not appeal to individual sports, especially the ruling powers of said activities who would be loath to yield any degree of their autonomy. When you boast control of your own budgets, plans, spheres of influence, empires and so forth it would be hard to apply the principle of share and share alike.

But maybe it’s time for sports and their relevant associations to be less insular and more open to co-operation which, in turn, could lead to a crossover of talent. Pooling of talent rather than strict and severe embarkation lines may just be the key. Rather than individual set ups, multi-sports complexes could point the way forward, broadening opportunity and shedding the dead hand of exclusivity.

Purists may shudder but how about an amalgam of golf and football?

Each sport, which derives multi-millions of pounds in revenue, could link-up and develop a national centre whereby a golf course and driving range and practice holes could be conjoined with football pitches, grass and all-weather, full-size and six-a-side.

It may sound flippant, but there’s no denying many footballers prove excellent golfers. So should young talents of both sports fail to excel at one they could, within the self-same complex, readily transfer their obvious expert co-ordination and control to the other.

Nascent talent could then be maximised to the full and there might not be so many cases of promising footballers or golfers slipping through the net or dropping down the hole to oblivion.

For all the blossoming of football and golf domestically, the latter sport is still dog-legged by an inherent selectivism ingrained by decades of head in the sand attitudes.

Even more elitist is tennis, which has not lacked finance, nor the manner of generating revenue, witness the ker-ching cash machine that is Wimbledon.

The Lawn Tennis Association has also doled out bucketfuls of cash trying to find a new generation of star players, but the present state of play in England is to be relegated to the sort of lower Davis Cup strata in which the likes of Antarctica, Nepal or the Faroes Islands are upcoming adversaries.

Can you imagine a boxing, or martial arts gymnasium, built alongside tennis courts?

Any lad who has all the aggression and drive and sheer balls to step into the ring would maybe then get the opportunity to take up tennis. Those gutsy qualities which guarantee survival within the ropes would be priceless if harnessed to a talent for rackets and rocketing serves.

Scots ace Andy Murray is the closest these islands have to someone with street-smarts like a McEnroe or a Connors. Just think if someone like Wayne Rooney proved as adept at golf or tennis as he is at football? Grand slams and Majors would be commonplace.