The day my son’s primary school held its Sports Day was, for the kids, probably the best day of the term (and certainly beat lessons). For most grownups, it seemed like the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. For parent volunteers, of whom I was a reluctant member, it was a marathon.
My normal strategy for surviving Sports Day is to take a good book and half a dozen oranges into which I’ve injected half a bottle of vodka and to see which I get into more. (So far, I’ve finished Lord Of The Rings and War & Peace, and there have been no mix-ups between grownup and kiddie oranges, though that would help explain my son’s erratic performance in the 2008 lime & spoon race).
If, as a spectator, you find a shady back row seat, you can get through several chapters (or millilitres) before your offspring even notice you missed their coming last in the three-legged (aka bust-your-head) race. You have to get up only as often as your kids are in events or you need the washroom/more oranges.
If you’re marshalling an event, though, you can’t hide behind a tree and watch Chelsea vs United on your iPad. You have to stand in the sun for as long as it takes to get through your event; and one apparently insignificant event, spread over an entire primary school, will not be over in a flash. Even the 100 metres dash becomes a long distance run.
The littlest ones, who are next to useless, go first, while your reserves of patience are still high. After them, there’s a vast bell curve of participants who will unfailingly bring tears of pride to their parents’ eyes but will never win an athletics scholarship, unless one is given in sheer ineptitude or tiddlywinks.
The older kids, the only ones who can really compete, come right at the end, and usually offer too much competition. Primary school sports: where hearts are broken but records aren’t kept.
Applying the bell curve to my event, the cricket ball throw, resulted in an hour of entertainment, trying to guess which way the ball would go when it left the little ones’ hands, followed by two hours of walking up and down placing little discs half a metre apart (we could just as fairly have awarded medals based on a coin as a cricket ball toss), followed by ten minutes of ducking the big boys’ pelting.
Only an ankle injury, sustained in patriotic jumping up in Trinidad Carnival, prevented me from entering the fathers’ race. Luckily.
Last year, the sports master took gold, predictably, but silver and bronze went to guys who made me look like Usain Bolt a mile from the outhouse after a bad roti; but I’d have been outpaced this year. One pardner said, “When I saw men bouncing on their heels, I declined. I only race against guys whose warm-up consists of curling half-a-case of Banks.”
For me, it ended without hospitalization or major embarrassment, so I feel like a champ; but, when all the jokes are said and done, what matters are not the medals, but the memories. And next year I’m not forgetting the oranges.
