This is a story about one of the world's top basketballers, a great soccer club, Chinese counterfeiters and a highly respected Newcastle company.
Oh ... and an initially sceptical journalist.
We received a media release this week that a company called AOK Health, based at Maryville in Newcastle, had a deal to send yoga mats and exercise balls to Liverpool FC's new training base.
It wasn't that we didn't believe Liverpool's elite athletes do yoga. They really do. We've seen the pictures. But we were wary about every man and his dog wanting a piece of Liverpool, which just won its first league title in 30 years.
And we couldn't fathom why Liverpool would be sourcing yoga mats from Australia. England has sports stores, right?
Turns out AOK Health makes exercise equipment for elite athletes. This isn't the sort of equipment you buy at K-Mart.
We hadn't heard of AOK Health, but they're well known in the business community. They've been exporting for 25 years.
AOK Health managing director Bradley Wilson said the company was working with German football giant Bayern Munich "providing some input on training methods for a sophisticated mini-trampoline system used for agility training for footballers".
Bradley doesn't just sell exercise products. He invents them.
"I'm an exercise scientist by trade. I worked as an aeronautical materials engineer for many years when I couldn't get a job in the field of exercise science in Australia," he said. [The penny finally dropped for us about here!]
"One of my specialities was in biomechanics, so I worked as an engineer for 10 years before I started this business. It was a meeting of opportunity and minds."
The media release we received added that Los Angeles Lakers basketball star LeBron James, the Miami Dolphins NFL side and Irish mixed martial artist and boxer Conor McGregor were also using AOK Health exercise balls. [This made us double down on our initial scepticism]
"The LeBron James one - his agent bought that retail online. We shipped it to America and didn't realise it was for him. A mate of mine sent photos of him carrying the ball to and from the gym," he said.
Elite personal trainers across the world buy AOK products. That's how Conor McGregor came to have one.
NFL sides including New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks are among other teams known to use AOK exercise balls.
Bradley saw the potential of exercise balls a long time ago.
"When I first started this, there were no exercise balls in gyms anywhere in the world. All of our R&D [research and development] has been through Newcastle University for the last 25 years," he said.
"What we created at Newcastle University was the first anti-burst ball in the world. It takes 1000 kilos of load. If you punctured it with a nail, it'd just go down slowly as opposed to bursting."
That was back in the 1990s.
"A lot of our ball technology has been stolen by the Chinese in the last 10 years in particular," he said.
"They reverse-engineered our mould shapes and started copying all our designs.
"I put lots of secret marks on our products to make sure we can identify them."
The Liverpool deal came about after a couple of players had been using AOK's equipment.
"They got in touch with us before Christmas to see if we could brand some of our products for them," he said.
AOK Health has sent 50 of its Duraball Xtreme exercise balls and 50 exercise mats [we call them yoga mats] to Liverpool FC.
Liverpool star striker Mohammed Salah once celebrated a goal with a yoga pose to show how the ancient discipline had helped his game.
"I am a yoga man. I do yoga and it just came into my mind," Salah said at the time.
Liverpool stars will use AOK's equipment in the gym and on the road at away games. The famous Liverpool logo was etched onto the yoga mats with a laser machine that stabilised the ink to prevent tatty smudges.
"It bonds perfectly onto the foam," Bradley said.
He came across the laser machine while doing a project for Hunter Medical Research Institute. [Can this story get any better?]
"I could have searched for 20 years and not found it. It was just a coincidence."
