When Sports Stars Go Motor Racing

This article originally appeared on VICE Sports UK.

The mind of an elite sportsperson must be an odd place. The 5am starts to get in that extra weights session, the relentless attitude towards healthy eating and drinking, the shunning of a social life and, in some cases, a family – it's all seen as worthwhile over a decade or more in pursuit of the ultimate goal.

Still, for a gold medallist, grand-slam winner or world champion, the end of a successful career that has given you fame, fortune and access to everything you could ever wish for is a time to sit back in your favourite armchair and relax in front of your trophy collection.

Or at least you'd think so.

For some, the adrenaline rush is just too hard to kick. No longer able to compete physically in their chosen sport, they look for another challenge.

Step forward motor racing. In pretty much everything outside Formula One, the sport involves reduced physical exertion for seasoned professional athletes. 'Just' two hours in a gym, five days a week, is hardly going to trouble a top-level football or tennis star, right? Unsurprisingly, motor racing's history is littered with elite sportspeople who have tried (and failed) to reach the same giddy heights they had previously scaled elsewhere. But what about the ones that have succeeded? We've pulled out 10 who just happen to fit the bill.

Most notable for his 60 Poland caps and Champions League-winning spell between the posts for Liverpool, as well as stints at Feyenoord and Real Madrid, Dudek began racing in the Volkswagen Polo Cup in Eastern Europe in 2014. He's yet to score more than a handful of top-10 finishes, but impressed enough to be invited by Robertas Kupcikas (series champion in Dudek's debut season), to join him in a SEAT Leon Cupra-R and make his international race debut at the Dubai 24 Hours last month. A podium finish in his class – despite a gearbox problem – is no less than his efforts deserved and sets up the potential for a full-season assault.

Dudek's finest hour: helping Liverpool to win the Champions League in 2005 | PA Images

Thrillseeker Chicherit found his niche in the adrenaline-fuelled sport of freestyle skiing, in which he was a four-time World Champion between 1999 and 2007. Such is his love for the white stuff that the last of those titles actually came after he'd switched to rally raids, but it was only after he focused entirely on driving that the real success began to arrive. His stand-out season came in 2009 when he won the Rally Transiberico, UAE Desert Challenge, and the FIA Cross-Country Rally World Cup. He's also won a number of stages on the Dakar Rally, and holds the distinction of being the first person to perform an unassisted backflip in a car. All in all, a pretty high-octane bloke.

A tough butcher's assistant from Vichy who pulled on a France rugby jersey on several occasions in the 1950s, Guy Ligier was a national rowing champion before finding a passion for motorsport. By 1966 he was racing in Formula One, but he lost the love for driving after close friend Jo Schlesser was killed at the '68 French Grand Prix, and focused instead on team ownership. Unsurprisingly, it is the eponymous constructor he established (after making a fortune in road-building) for which he will be remembered. From 1976-96, Equipe Ligier won nine world championship grands prix and peaked with second place in the race for the 1980 constructors' title behind Williams.

Frenchman Vouilloz is one of the most successful downhill mountain bikers in history, having won the first of his three junior world titles at the age of 16 in 1992 and adding seven senior World Championships over the coming years. He switched to rallying in his late twenties and, with a Peugeot factory contract in his pocket, was victorious in the 2008 Intercontinental Rally Challenge, a series won in subsequent years by future WRC winners Kris Meeke and Andreas Mikkelsen.

Vouilloz tackling a very snowy rally stage aboard his Peugeot

An elite shooter who represented Qatar at the Atlanta and Sydney Olympics in the skeet discipline, Al-Attiyah developed a need for speed and won the Middle-East Rally Championship in 2003 in what was only his second full season of competition. Since then he's won the gruelling Dakar Rally twice, the World Rally Championship's Production Cup (2004) and WRC-2 division (2014 and '15), taken 10 of the past 11 Middle-East titles and claimed the FIA Cross-Country Rally World Cup twice. He's kept up his shooting too, qualifying for the Athens and Beijing Olympics and securing a bronze medal at London 2012.

The undisputed king of the slopes in 1997, Frenchman Alphand won that year's Alpine World Cup despite only taking part in two of the four eligible disciplines: the downhill and Super-G. A varied motorsport career followed over the next decade, with victory on the gruelling Dakar Rally in 2006, and a class podium in a Chevrolet Corvette at the Le Mans 24 Hours six months later the undoubted highlights.

Cycling's most decorated Olympian with six gold medals and a silver, Hoy traded pedal power for something a bit quicker in 2013 when he indulged his passion to race Radical sportscars at club level. Nissan was impressed enough to sign him for the following season, and he rewarded the Japanese marque in 2015 when he and Charlie Robertson won the European Le Mans Series' LMP3 title for baby Le Mans prototypes. Still only 39, a Le Mans drive in June had seemed certain, but with Nissan's commitment to sportscar racing undecided he may have to wait.

As well-known for his high-profile slip-ups at Old Trafford as he is for keeping goal for France during its victorious World Cup and European Championship campaigns of 1998 and 2000, Barthez always loved fast cars. Fortunately, he has plenty of driving talent too and became French GT champion in 2013 in a Ferrari, beating a talented group of drivers that included 1996 Monaco GP winner Olivier Panis and current Porsche factory racer Kevin Estre. Now competing internationally in the hugely-popular Blancpain Endurance Series for exotic GT3 supercars, he also made his Le Mans 24 Hours debut in 2014, and has partnered with Panis to form a new endurance team to compete internationally.

One of the most successful coaches in NFL history, Gibbs led the Washington Redskins to three Superbowl victories and four NFC crowns, but turned his attentions to motorsport in 1992 by setting up his own NASCAR team: Joe Gibbs Racing. Four drivers' championships and 128 race wins in NASCAR's top division have been achieved since, with Bobby Labonte and Tony Stewart conquering the division in the early-2000s, and Kyle Busch adding the latest title last November with a remarkable late-season comeback.

It's rare for any human to be quite as talented in the sporting field as Alfonso de Portago – or, to give him his proper title, Alfonso Antonio Vicente Eduardo Angel Francisco de Borja Cabeza de Vaca y Leighton, Marquis of Portago. A three-time champion jockey in France, 'Fon' contested the Grand National twice and represented Spain internationally at both swimming and bobsleigh, establishing the national team in the latter sport and taking the four-man crew to fourth at the 1956 Winter Olympics. It's almost no surprise that his switch to motorsport unearthed yet another of his talents. Alas, less than a year after finishing second for Ferrari at the 1956 British Grand Prix (the best finish for a Spaniard until Fernando Alonso came along), he crashed and died on the fearsome Mille Miglia, having achieved all of the above by the age of just 28.