For the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to be selected to represent Great Britain as we prepare for a memorable performance in the London games of 2012. Due to the majority of international volleyball events taking place in the summer, I haven’t had a holiday since the middle of the last decade.  

In fact if you added up all of the days I haven’t been with the national team or with a club team in the last four or five years, I’m not sure you’d even be able to mark off all the days of a month, even February. This is not a complaint.  I’ve been incredibly fortunate to represent my country and I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.  
I’m sure you, Nick, feel the same way about your various club and country experiences. This is surely why you raised this issue when you were asked if you were entitled to your reported £50,000 a week contract with Arsenal. I would like to point out on your behalf, you earn a third of the money of a number of your peers. You make the genuine comparison with "entertainers".

You fill a stadium. Well, not you alone, but you know what I mean. Volleyball, by comparison, is a relatively new spectator sport to Britain. I’d like to bet we fill Earls Court during the Olympics but we’re nowhere near the culturally dominant force that football represents. 

However, I would gently point out that while you are required to "live football", as you put it, my teammates and I "live volleyball". It is not only footballers who work hard and sacrifice their preferred lifestyle in a pursuit bringing glory to their sport and countries of origin.  

I can reveal that as a 28-year-old man, I do not own a car and in addition to that I haven’t even had time to take a driving test so I can switch my old American driving License (my Dad comes from Acton, I grew up in the States) to a UK one. On the rare occasion I do have a spare couple days, I stay at my 92-year-old nan’s flat in Wandsworth and have to make do with five telly channels.  

I will come clean about my earnings to show solidarity with you, Nick. I too think I do not have to justify my £500 a monthly wage packet I receive when I’m with the Great Britain national volleyball team.
I admire you Mr. Bendtner. In face of much mockery, you have stood your ground and refused to be painted as a "soft" foreign player who wears gloves and a snood in September. I know how you feel. I am currently playing volleyball in north eastern Poland and it was -27c just the other day, exactly like North London in early September!  

You are forced to live in London to ply your trade. You have to try and communicate in a language that isn’t your mother tongue.  You have probably had to turn to personal endorsements just to  make ends meet!  

I write this letter to let you know you are not alone.  In the past seven years, I have been forced to live in seven different countries. That’s speak six different languages. I am ashamed to admit that I can only speak three of them, but I will! From your point of view, how do people not see that travelling back and forth from London to Denmark to visit family is a real grind? All those cheap airlines you have to use. You will be happy to hear that I too can fit all of my life’s possessions into one duffel bag and a backpack.
The final concern of mine is the apparent resentment of others that you have had the dumb luck of being a footballer in a time of such obscene wealth and excess not seen since the last days of Rome. Are people trying to suggest that by merely collecting your yearly salary you are not worth more than 104 teachers? Impossible. Would they have had the foresight to wear neon pink boots when no one else would?  I think not.

Don’t think I am guilty of that resentment myself. Good luck to you, Nick. It is the fate of the GB volleyball team, at this time, to be a force relatively unknown. We understand it. We just want to change it. The only way of doing that is to perform to our maximum at the London Olympics. At the moment we’re ghosts in our own country.
 

But, at heart, we are the same. We are athletes. All we want to do is line up alongside our countrymen, look up at the flag, belt out the national anthem and then play to the best of our ability. In this, if not in earnings, I humbly suggest we are brothers. 

Regards,

 

 

P.S. But if you are going skiing give me a call.  It’ll have to be your treat mind.