There’s a great saying, credited to former Clinton White House staffer Paul Begala, but also to other sources, that politics is show business for ugly people. To that, we paraphrase: elections are sport for the non-sporty.

Either that, or reality TV. But elections have become sure-fire grist for the media’s mill, juicing ratings and page views everywhere, and the notion of “horse-race coverage” has entered political reportage. While it hasn’t been the best thing, perhaps, for the democratic process (polling gets covered more intensely than issues), the phenomenon is obvious. A large slice of the public is so into the competitive aspect of elections that, the morning after polling day, we’re already looking ahead to what the next election might hold.

The next federal election is upon us in the coming month, and while it behoves us to think deeply about how sports-related issues fit into the big picture of how we as voters make a well-informed choice, there’s not much in terms of policy difference when it comes to sport. That’s not for lack of issues: the role and conduct of ASADA’s investigation into performance-enhancing drugs, for one, the prevalence of gambling advertising as well as the longer-term balance of public funding for elite sport versus increasing recreational opportunities. However, the main political parties have long been indistinguishable when it comes to sport, and remain so.

If not parties, we’re left to look at leaders, and if the return of Kevin Rudd has proven anything, it’s that Australian politics has gone down the path of becoming ever more presidential. Under these circumstances, the character of the leader becomes paramount. And what better way to reveal character, as the saying goes, than to look at how Mr Rudd and Mr Abbott relate to sports?

The incumbent prime minister has proven himself a sports fan – albeit something of a regulation one. Rudd shows up dutifully with the proper scarf on, and while he has a vastly greater comfort level when he pops up in the stands than a Keating or a Whitlam did, he certainly falls short of Howard’s level of cricket tragic or Hawke’s full-blast “Any boss who sacks a worker for not turning up today is a bum” fandom.

When it comes to his sporting bona fides, Rudd ultimately can’t shake his overriding archetype – that of the nerd. Fairfax journalist Martin Flanagan made the point that we “know” certain footballers as a type of person we all went to school with. “Kids who were good at sport sat up the back of the class and got into trouble … Most of us went to school with someone like Kevin. He sat at the front of the class. He was a nerd; very bright, a bit odd, didn’t fit in.”

Sports and nerds are no longer mutually exclusive – the new-wave stats geeks put an end to that. But Rudd still comes across as the sort of person who keeps up with sports to be able to carry on lunchroom conversations in the office on Monday. As a sports fan, perhaps he would be more convincing if, say, he showed an abiding interest in the inner mechanics of Duckworth-Lewis.

Chalk it up as another aspect of the Rudd enigma; Abbott, however, represents a different prospect entirely – the MAMIL PM. Surely calculated to enhance an image of vitality, sport courses through the Abbott bio: Queenscliff Surf Life Saving Club, Oxford Blue for boxing, Port Macquarie Ironman, Manly Sea Eagles fan. His level of fitness is rather admirable, but also not an unalloyed positive – his aggressive political persona is in no way softened by an image of physical indestructibility.

It’s interesting, then, that Abbott could be a zeitgeist marker, a symbol of one of the profound socio-recreational phenomena of the times. Those bike-riding, pod-forming, middle-age men in Lycra are easy objects of derision, having refused to go and play golf like a mature gentleman should, choosing instead to splash six-figure sums on a Pinarello with the carbon frame and disappear off into the early mornings.

It’s mid-life crisis, to be sure, and as mid-life crises go, it’s healthier on every level than buying a sports car. The main criticism of MAMIL-dom seems to rest on how immodest it is – rather than conducting all that bro-mantic business in a private space, the new way is to literally parade it on the streets. It’s classic baby boomer behaviour, that mix of won’t-grow-old, try-hard-iness that the Xs and Ys coming up behind them disdain so much. Abbott’s political opponents have expended plenty of energy trying to paint him as some sort of reactionary – really, they should’ve just played up the whole boomer-on-a-bike angle.

So there you have it: suspect sports nerd versus the too-eager weekend warrior. Choose wisely.