It’s Super Tuesday. The day when 10 states, accounting for 410 delegates, will hold their primaries and caucuses to decide the Republican nomination for this year’s presidential election in November.

 

Huh? You might be wondering: Why has politics managed to spill out of the News section and leak into the Sports section? And why should I care? I myself am not even a citizen of this country, why should it even be important who gets to sit in the Oval Office?

 

As much as I might not want to admit it, the identity of the U.S. president does actually have a big impact on my life; the president is able to make a huge impact, for good or bad, on my world both inside and outside of this country’s borders. And the health of the president is perhaps just as important as all the other issues that have been endlessly debated over this drawn-out campaign.

 

A candidate’s health is important primarily because it would not be a good thing if the President were unable to do his or her job due to health problems. But being healthy has other advantages too: Being physically fit aids cognitive abilities and being able to blow off steam by going for a run or hitting the gym reduces stress. There is a third reason as well. Ahead of the last Gulf War, a senior Iraqi made the suggestion that Presidents George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein could square up against each other mano-a-mano to settle their differences. It might have been a joke, but if it weren’t, maybe it would have been worth seriously considering. Almost 5,000 Allied soldiers died as a direct result of the invasion and its aftermath, and the number of Iraqi lives lost could number anything from between 100,000 to 1,000,000.

 

So, assuming one of them can defeat incumbent President Barack Obama, the athletic abilities of the four remaining Republican candidates might just turn out to be pretty important over the next four years.

 

But how could we analyze this important facet of the candidates? Last week, the professional football world turned to the NFL scouting combine to learn more about the players in the upcoming NFL Draft. If it’s good enough for football, maybe it should be good enough for the Republicans. At the very least, I’d rather see the candidates doing cone drills and the 40-yard dash than debate again.

 

Given that, disappointingly, this is probably not going to be happening any time soon, what can we learn about the candidates? Time to turn with trepidation to the Internet. My trepidation stems from that fact that I’m not entirely convinced that all the “facts” on the Web are incredibly reliable, and also because searching for Santorum famously produces some “interesting” hits.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is relatively hard to get detailed facts on the physical attributes of these four, but after a little bit of work I came up with age and some estimate of their heights and weights: Newt Gingrich is 68 years old, 5-foot-10 and 240 pounds; Ron Paul is 76 years old, 5-foot-10 and 135 pounds; Mitt Romney is 64 years old, 6-foot-2 and 197 pounds; and Rick Santorum is 53 years old, 6-foot-4 and 170 pounds.

 

And, for comparison, the stats of their biggest rival — Barack Obama is 50 years old, 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds.

 

While Obama beats all four on age, that is perhaps a cheap shot that doesn’t take into account lifestyle factors. We could instead look at Body Mass Index, a simple way to estimate whether a person is the normal weight for his or her height (anything between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered normal.) Gingrich, Paul, Romney and Santorum measure up as 34.4, 19.4, 25.3 and 20.7 on this statistic, respectively, and Rival-in-Chief Obama is 23.7. While Paul, Santorum and Obama are classified within the normal range, Romney is marginally overweight, and Gingrich is obese. This analysis, though, has its limitations. Simply being heavier doesn’t imply that someone necessarily has greater body fat — though Gingrich is probably not all muscle — and lighter bodies can still be unfit ones.

 

However, probably the best clue to their athletic fitness is to look at what they do to stay healthy. Gingrich’s exercise of choice is apparently golf, and it shows. He is clearly not among the fittest of the candidates. Santorum supposedly does 50 push-ups a day, but doesn’t seem to have a publicized health routine apart from that. The other three, though, all at least represented high school teams, Romney and Paul as runners. In fact, Paul was even Pennsylvania’s 220-yard dash state champion in 1952, and Obama was on his high school’s basketball team. Romney still runs; Paul, though holding the honor of being the oldest, regularly walks and rides his bike, even challenging others to a bike ride in the Houston heat; and Obama still plays basketball and hits the gym.

 

Obama is going to be a tough competitor to beat, but if health does play a part in this election, perhaps Romney or Paul might be best suited to keep pace with him.

 

 

Tom Taylor just wrote a sports column with more references to Newt Gingrich’s obesity than to college or professional sports. Remind him why politics have no place in sports columns at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.