Sports day: on trying and failing and going on
Where I question a winning ethos. Dammit, the taking part is the best bit.
There’s been so much chat about sport results recently – is it more important to play badly and win or play brilliantly and potentially lose? I’m firmly of the latter camp and always have. Sport is an entertainment industry. It requires an investment of your time to watch and admire skill, and if there’s no skill on display except a firm defensive line, you can eke out a 1-0 (football) or 9-3 (rugby) win but will that inspire joy?
I had to laugh during the other football semi-final last week when all the expert pundits in the studio backed France to win against Spain. France’s defensive line will do the job, they proclaimed in their way. And then the French played less defensively, the Spanish won, and we all witnessed a better game of football entertainment for it.
The ongoing chat about entertainment over results comes at the same time as sports day season dawns over the country’s schools. How I hated sports day.
For many years, I’ve been berated by my mother for being a bad loser. When playing board games or card games or whatever, I didn’t handle losing well. My mother always blamed a great-aunt who, when I played games with her as a child, let me win. I have no memory of this at all but the idea has stuck with my mother. It is of course untrue. I was a bad loser because of sports day.
Picture the scene. A primary school field, a hot day. A queue of children who have spent the afternoon ‘racing’. Some of them have medals made out of milk bottle tops. Some have more than one. I have none. One of the other girls laughs at me. She is unpleasant and sneering and she makes me feel like shit. I cannot be more than six years old. I know where this girl lives and for years afterwards when we go past the house on the bus I have a flush of remembering how bad she made me feel.
I’ve talked to lots of people about sports day over the years and all of them have stories about hating sports day because they were made to feel bad about not winning. Clearly I don’t have any sporty friends. (I should mention that I’m a better loser now. More practice at it for a start.)
The rationale goes that children need competition, that it’s healthy to have winners and losers and things to strive for. Others speak of the ‘all must have prizes’ ethos, that the taking part is important. Despite being incredibly competitive internally, I fall into the latter camp.
When my daughter took her SATs exams, she was terribly worried. She wanted to do well because she didn’t want to let me or her teachers down. And I told her over and again, that if she tried her hardest, concentrated and worked hard, that was all I would ask for. If she did her best and could look herself in the eye and say she tried, that was all I cared about. But on sports day, if she can’t run as fast as someone else, she’s branded a failure?
I cannot possibly get behind this idea. Some of us aren’t fast or flexible, some of us can’t jump. I have been doing yoga for years and I’m no more flexible now than I was when I started. It doesn’t mean the yoga isn’t valuable. Taking part in the practice is as important as being able to put my heel on the floor in downward dog.
Rewarding effort works. I was never going to be an Olympic athlete but ensuring that I feel pleased having tried at exercise means the chances of me continuing to exercise and look after my health, strength and mental wellbeing improve too and isn’t that a good thing? When I no longer had to exercise as compulsory PE you bet I stopped doing anything. If my PE teachers had been more encouraging for the physical underachievers, there’s a good chance that wouldn’t have happened.
Rewarding prizes (or not) to children who are not mature enough to deal sensibly with the elation or rejection does very little except make them smug or self-loathing. It also feeds into a culture of school PE that appeared (in my day) to be focused around competition and subsequent humiliation. Who could or couldn’t do something, be it high jump or being selected for the netball team (both further humiliations for me personally), was the be all and end all for school sports. Combine that with the scratchy socks and communal showers and the end result is a load of people who stop exercising as soon as they can and don’t go back to it for years. I run regularly now, something that would come as a surprise to my PE teachers, and I love it. I’m also past the point where I improve at it at all and that’s ok.
The element of competition seems to be everywhere. Fans booing other teams, rivalry in who has got something that you haven’t, and especially in politics. We seem to be driven by the idea of doing better than the others and nowhere is there the spirit of working together. We have to win and the consequences for failure seem to be bigger and harder. Perhaps if we spent more time valuing the playing, the competitive element would become less fraught.
At my daughter’s primary school, the ethos of sports did seem to have changed. They picked children to represent the school regardless of ability, just if they haven’t yet had a chance to try it. She went off to a handball tournament with no experience of handball at all, just because the PE teacher said she hadn’t represented the school yet. She loved it. This doesn’t appear to be the case at secondary school. But I will encourage her to feel that trying and working hard is the best thing to do and sometimes that will bring reward. Sometimes others may do better. You deal with it and move on, knowing you’ve taken part. Looking back, the taking part is usually what you remember.
One of the best days of my life was at the Heineken Cup Final in 2011, watching my boys, Northampton Saints, play Leinster. I was in the front row in Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. I’d got the coach over to Cardiff from Northampton, wandered around the city centre in my black, green and gold speaking to other fans and looking in the shops until kick off time came. Cardiff was full of rugby fans as the Challenge Cup final had been played the day before and fans from across France, Italy and the home nations had booked tickets. There was a joyous atmosphere.
We were not the favourites but we had played brilliantly in the tournament so far. Leinster also had the advantage of an extra week’s rest before while we had played a gruelling semi-final game in the Premiership. Nevertheless, we gave it everything we had and scored three tries in the first half. I couldn’t believe it.
In the second half, tiredness took over and so did Jonny Sexton, organising the Irish to claim the game in a brilliant display. I’ve no idea what the score was but we lost. That’s not really what I remember. What I remember is this:
· Standing in the queue for the shopping centre toilets and being questioned by a Welsh woman if we’d brought our mascot with us because she was very fond of him.
· The huge crowd of fans standing outside the stadium booting a rugby ball up into the crowd over and over and cheering, with no violence or bother.
· The smell of the turf and the chilly atmosphere of the stadium with the roof closed.
· The rush of Leinster fans to shake hands and get pictures with our players at the end as much as with their own. The respect and friendliness they showed to us at half time as well.
· Waving to the Irish fans from our coach as we pulled away to go home.
· Ben Foden hauling Brian O’Driscoll down five metres short of the try line.
· The pride and fun of it all. Singing and applauding my team at the end.
Who cares about the result?
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