Winning. Does it matter?

Sports day at school has changed over the years, there has been a shift in the zeitgeist, there are no losers any more, only winners. There are no wooden spoons, no taunting of the red faced urchin puffing and panting as he appears minutes after his peers. I have yet to see an individual medal given out at any sports day I have only witnessed winning teams that are made to applaud the losers. It is fair to say that there is little reason to encourage too much competitiveness as unless your child has a glaringly obvious talent, they will gain as much from winning as they do from losing. That is life for all non-professional athletes so you might as well get used to it as a child.

The obvious exception to the 'why bother?' rule is the parents 100m sprint. I have never seen such shame and glory dished out in 20 seconds. If your child is in a comprehensive junior school then the likelihood is that there will be a range of shapes, sizes and ages of the parents. It is not an exaggeration to say that some of the runners will be old enough to be the parents of some of the other runners.

The last race I saw resulted to two causalities. As they lined up I saw gentlemen in their early forties, dressed in chords and sandals, glasses in hand, standing alongside fleet footed youths, dressed in full tracksuits, trainers pumped up, who had not long left school themselves. One of these young men's biceps outweighed the entire mass of the elder competitors. And the whistle blew. The elder runners started surprising well but this turned out to be ill advised. The younger more powerful individuals charged to catch up but there was not enough room to go around so they went over. With one slight push of his mighty arm the eventual winner knocked two challengers over leaving then face down in the dirt. A child looked on in dismay, the strongest man in the world, his dad, had been vanquished, flattened with ease. Another child stood chest puffed out as his dad bounded over the finish line. The children may have had to clap their peers when they lost but there was no such conduct for the felled runners. There was only pointing and howls of laughter.