SIDELINE CUT:The Schools' Sports Day will have left many of us with some bittersweet memories but still there was nothing quite like watching your teacher in a pair of shorts, writes KEITH DUGGAN
IN SCHOOLS all over Ireland, the Sports Day season is in full swing. Is there a more wonderful or terrifying day on the Irish schools’ calendar? It is true that these are taxing days for Irish schools, what with teachers being let go, something like a billion quid going on rented prefabs, overcrowding, substandard classrooms, lack of recreational facilities and all the rest of it.
In fact, it is half a wonder that the teachers of Ireland aren’t so demoralised by the system that they even bother doing anything beyond the basic demands of the curriculum. But Sports Day is one of the great – and unchanging – rituals of Irish school life and over the next few weeks the detritus of Sports Days – smashed potatoes, torn paisley ties, apple butts, ripped sacks and always, always a forgotten stocking hanging from briars – will be evident in fields across the land.
Those of you who have not had occasion to call in on the Sports Day in your locality will be pleased to learn that they remain blissfully unaffected by modernity. It might have been expected that contemporary Sports Days might now include a round on the Wii, some sort of scuba diving, dry-slope skiing or any of the more exotic pursuits that the nation has embraced over the past decade. But all the old staples are thriving: the sack race, the egg and spoon contest and that most maddening of all disciplines, the three-legged race (The day this race is rendered appropriate for the Olympics is the day Ireland will make out like a bandit on the medals table).
Everybody has distorted memories of their own Sports Day years. Whenever the subject will come up, someone will say wistfully, “I was great at the egg and spoon” or “I think I came third in the sack race”.
These are the lies we tell ourselves. When you see today’s practitioners going through their madcap and unbelievably energetic trial runs for the TLR or the ES, you find yourself passing on all these “tips” acquired during your own time – holding the egg with your thumb, using extra baggy sacks; teaching kids how to cheat, in other words (You can bet your life that in the cupboard of every banking executive in Ireland there lies a small dusty cup awarded for an Under-8 ES race achieved by devious methodology).
There are certain truisms about the Irish Sports Day. 1 It is always sunny (genuinely: take yesterday – there must have been hundreds of Irish kids sprinting with eggs and spuds in every province in the land and was it not one of the salad days?). 2 There is always a small, skinny-as-a-rail youngster who crosses the line in first place more often than Carl Lewis. 3 The three-legged race is the litmus test of any boyhood friendship. 4 It is impossible to hear that is being said on the megaphone. 5 Hitting the ground face first when your friend applies too much speed in the wheelbarrow race is incredibly sore. 6 The competitors – the kids – don’t really care a hoot who wins and who doesn’t. 7 Nothing prepares a child for the shock of seeing his headmaster wearing sports apparel – particularly shorts. 8 When you’re five, running the 60-yard dash feels like running 10,000 metres. 9 When its over, it seems unreasonable and unfair that school can’t be like that every day.
Those of us whose Sports Day trials and tribulations took place in the suddenly in-vogue decade of the 1980s will have bittersweet memories of the event. Our own Sports Day took place in a football pitch and with the big stand and the pitch all lined and an actual finishing line, the place looked incredibly professional. I have been fortunate enough to have been at the last three Olympic Games but nothing that Sydney, Athens or Beijing had to offer matched the sheer intimidating vastness of that first Sports Day.
It was like stepping into a different world. They used actual eggs then, instead of the eminently more sensible substitute of the potato. Sometimes the eggs were raw and sometimes they were hard boiled – which was fine in the actual race but hazardous afterwards when they were converted into weapons of warfare. Giving kids eggs to do with what they will is a recipe for trouble.
Some of those eggs had been left boiling to the point where they were literally unbreakable: they would come back off the gable walls fully intact. It led to trouble – a friend became completely speechless with fear when he fired an egg that chipped the window of a teacher’s car. Another friend all but decapitated a lad from a neighbouring class who drifted into the flight path of an egg that had yielded no prizes on the athletic fields.
It was a pure accident but the consequences were terrible, what with the blood, the ambulance, the concussion and the threat of court action which lingered over the family home for several months afterwards. They say that the poor guy still has a slight indentation in his forehead.
Sports Days inflict certain painful truths upon all children. That old saying that there is always going to be someone better: you find that out a third of the way into the sack race. As for the three-legged: there is no surer example of the way friendships just perish.
It is, of course, a form of torture to tie two children together with the expectation that they will be able to synchronise both their thoughts and their movements. Nobody of my acquaintance – and certainly no one tethered to me with their old man’s striped tie – ever finished a TLR. The usual practice was to come out of the blocks like some kind of multi-legged demon, hit a speed bump about 10 metres in, lose traction shortly after that, stumble through to roughly the halfway point and then renege on all loyalty to one another and hit the turf with such violence that the tied limb was half-yanked from its socket – most Irish hip replacements and serious groin injuries can be traced back to TLRs.
Once you hit the deck, recovery is impossible: there is nothing much to do but lie on the grass and watch the more lithe and more brilliant lads disappear into the distance, the crowd urging them on, unerringly closing in on the gold and the glory and the girls of their future. And it is the worst kind of disappointment because not only have you let yourself down, you have cost your friend as well – a guy who might had realistic hopes of a placing had he not been stuck with you.
In silence, you free yourselves of your auntie’s hosiery or your brother’s belt or whatever strapping you were using and limp off the track in abject shame. There are, of course, untold psychological and metaphorical inferences to be drawn from this act of freeing yourselves from one another. You go your own ways and if, half an hour later, you are trying to split one another’s heads with an egg, then things are okay.
And it is true what the teachers tell you: Sports Day is not about winning. That is mainly because one or two kids are so superior to the rest that they hoover everything going. We had this one lad who, at 10, was built like Daley Thompson and was brilliant at every sport he tried. For the TLR, he would just grab whatever lad was closest to him, strap him to his leg and complete the thing in a full-out sprint, his partner bouncing along on the grass behind him as if he was roped to the back of a Hillbilly’s truck. This guy was exceptional: he might have been our greatest Olympian but I think he found Sports Day so easy he lost interest in field athletics and a few years later opted instead for the route of smokes and nightclubs – in later life, he liked to say that the sack was still his best event.
But it is a relief to know Sports Day is still flourishing. It is a special day. You can only half remember it but you never forget it because the first time that you line up for the ES or the Wheelbarrow or the TLR is the last time in your life that you will remain unbeaten. On Your marks, get set . . .
