A multiple Olympic running champion scores for a professional soccer club, a rugby league icon joins a former opening batsman helping to run a footy club, a footballer joins a television basketball commentary team while a former rower-turned-cyclist leads the world’s biggest ironman triathlon.

Usain Bolt is used to being the headline act and was clearly the highest profile of that attention-grabbing list.

The Jamaican sprinter’s signing by A-League soccer club Central Coast Mariners has got publicity stunt written all over it, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As a result of Bolt’s 195-centimetre frame and immeasurable public appeal, a huge crowd turned out for an otherwise meaningless pre-season friendly on Friday night and two goals from the main man ensured they went home happy.

The crowd at Campbelltown Stadium in Sydney was announced as 9958 – suspiciously similar to Bolt’s 100-metre world record of 9.58 seconds which also explained his shirt number of 95.

So far so good for that experiment, but as English soccer fans are prone to pondering over similar big-name signings – how will he perform on a wet Wednesday night at Burton?

Two days earlier came the equally unlikely announcement of who would be the latest addition to St Kilda’s football program.

Fair to say that Billy Slater was not the obvious choice for the role but the clues were there.

The NRL great has multi-sport form having seen off stiff competition from the likes of Jamie Whincup, Steve Hooker, Lote Tuqiri and Andrew Symonds to win Channel Nine’s Australia’s Greatest Athlete in 2009.

Meanwhile the Saints have a history of looking beyond the parameters of football having previously appointed Tasmania’s Test cricket outcast Jamie Cox to the role of football department general manager, since when he has become head of the club’s emerging football program.

Cox does have a footy background having been drafted in 1987 to Essendon where he never played a game so instead set about scoring 18,614 runs in first-class cricket.

And such cross-sport conundrums are nothing new.

Brad Green could have played professional cricket or soccer before opting for football, Max Walker managed to combine 85 games of AFL football at Melbourne with 34 Test cricket matches with Australia while Israel Folau and Karmichael Hunt famously hopped between footy codes in search of greater challenges and even greater salaries.

Meanwhile Cricket Tasmania paved the way for St Kilda’s left-field appointment when announcing its new high performance general manager in June 2017.

Drew Ginn certainly has runs on the board, albeit not of the cricket variety.

A five-time world champion, four-time Olympian and triple Olympic gold medallist, the rower is best remembered as a member of the Oarsome Foursome and firmly believed not coming from a cricket background gave him an advantage in attempting to build a culture of success at Bellerive.

Again there are plenty of precedents elsewhere with rowing playing a lead role.

The current chief executive of Rowing Australia is Ian Robson who has previously held the same position at Melbourne Victory in soccer, Essendon and Hawthorn in footy, the Auckland Warriors in rugby league and SportsScotland where he helped develop that country’s national sport strategy.

On a visit to Tasmania in March, the Hobart-born administrator said the challenges facing each sport he has been involved in were uncannily similar and rarely limited to just that field.

Rowing was also the origin of perhaps the most remarkable story of sport hopping this week.

A triathlete opting to specialise in one of the sport’s three disciplines – such as Richie Porte in 2007 – is hardly a case of reinventing the wheel, but Cameron Wurf has gone the other way.

Wurf began his sporting life as a rower, winning an under-23 world championship and attending the 2004 Athens Olympics. The switch to cycling saw him compete in three Grand Tours before another sea-change to focus on triathlon climaxed when he led the ironman world titles in Hawaii for the second year running on Sunday. 

Meanwhile on the same day that St Kilda was thinking outside the goal square, an Adelaide Crow also found himself on foreign territory.

Announcing the “star-studded” commentary line-up for season 2018-19, the NBL said that joining former NBA players Shane Heal and Chris Anstey and a host of former NBL players would be Hugh Greenwood.

Like fellow Hobartian Wurf, the 2017 AFL grand finalist enjoyed life on a different sporting planet before opting for a whole new ball game.

​Greenwood was a member of the Australian Emus at the 2009 FIBA under-19 world cup, played US college basketball and had an NBL contract with Perth Wildcats lined up before reverting to the sport which saw his grandfather Peter Marquis play 99 games for Melbourne Demons.

“​Guess we’ll soon find out if I still know what I’m talking about,” Greenwood Tweeted, along with the obligatory smiling emoji.

Quite where all this double dipping will end is anyone’s guess although it would be hard to look past Silver Ferns shooter Maria Folau persuading her husband into a sport, nationality and gender switch for the remainder of the Constellation Cup netball series.

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