SPORTS DAY

‘Tis the season to find yourself in a frenzy of end of term activity.  Particularly if, like me, you have a child just about to leave primary school.  There have been end of year drinks, end of year parties, end of year productions, end of year trips to Chessington Zoo, end of year celebration nights, end of year anything else you can think of to waste everybody’s time and of course there is end of year sports day. 

Sports day brings out the best and the worst of humanity I think.  Children trying their hardest and parents screaming from the sidelines. To be honest, I am incandescently bored of sports days – rather like children’s parties I have had to endure far too many of them (32 and counting) and my photograph albums are full of tiny specs of unidentifiable children running down a field.  But in addition to boredom, there is also the looming fear at the thought of the Mother’s race and of course a little bit of excitement and/or sympathy thrown in for the ups and downs of the races themselves.  The children run their little socks off, some laughing when they lose, some crying.  Such raw determination.  It’s great.  So you can imagine that when I turned up yesterday to find that they have redesigned the whole day to ensure that “everyone is a winner”, I was not terribly impressed.  Ok, the children probably prefer it, but is it right to protect them from the concept of winners and losers?  It’s a tough world out there and I’m not sure we are doing much to help them if we allow ourselves to bring up a generation of winners.  We all have our sports day nightmare – mine was getting stuck in the sack during the sack race, falling flat on my face and having to crawl to the finish line – did that do me any harm?  Well yes, probably. 

One huge bonus of the newly designed sports day was that they have done away with the parents races.  Normally, I am filled with trepidation about how to get out of the Mother’s race without my children losing face.  The reason I don’t want to participate in it is because I won’t win.  Obviously this is not the right message to be sending to my children, so I have had to make up excuses (like I’ve got my period).  I was sorry not to be able to watch the mothers in high heels and wrap around skirts suddenly peel off their clothes to reveal cycling shorts and killer spikes and doing star jumps in preparation.

The Father’s race is even worse.  It should come with a government health warning.  It is one of the most dangerous races the world has ever known.  Emotionally charged, completely determined, focused, highly competitive men who have temporarily lost all sense of sanity (because their children are watching), stampede down the length of the field, divets flying and hamstrings snapping all the way.  If you are unfortunate enough to be standing reasonably close to the finishing line you are now either in a coma or dead. These men can’t stop – they are running so fast that it takes them 200 yards to slow down and stop, that’s if they haven’t hit a standing object first. Last year one of the dad’s fell over during the race, badly injuring his ankle.  He hobbled over to his daughter, who was crying hysterically.  “It’s alright darling, I’ll be OK”, he said to her.  “I don’t care about whether you’ll be OK, you’ve really, really embarrassed me and now everybody will laugh”, was her devastating reply.

“Why is my child the only one wearing a white T-shirt?” I asked my friend.  “Because you’re the only useless mother who doesn’t know that they have to wear a green T-shirt for PE”.  Do you know I have now had three children at that school and have therefore been there for about 10 years and I have failed to notice that they wear green T-shirts, not white for PE.  How crap is that?  About as crap as having to make my children’s sandwiches with mouldy bread this morning I suspect (I did pick the mouldy bits out and they do say that mouldy bread is good for you).

Anyway, the really good news is that the red colour team won on points and my daughter is red colour team captain so she went up to collect the trophy.  The really bad news is that I am such a crap mother I didn’t even have my camera with me and so will have one less proud child photo for my album.