So, the Olympics are nearly over. I haven't watched much of them. I saw the Jamaican team take their hat trick in the men's 200 metres, and watched some of the archery which was unexpectedly fascinating. I was amazed to discover that wind surfing was an Olympic sport, and didn't understand what was going on half the time in the cycling. But I didn't mind it, even when it bumped the R5 film programme off the air on Friday afternoons, and it was nice for the Systems Administrator to have all that sport to watch while ill.
No, what has upset me now is the rising crescendo of commitments to increase the amount of school sport. A few days ago there were just a few pundits and Boris Johnson going on about it, but now the Prime Minister has weighed in.
“The idea of an Olympics legacy has been built into the DNA of London 2012 from the very beginning,” the Prime Minister said. “Now the London Olympics has been a great success and, as we turn our attention to the Paralympics, we need to use the inspiration of the Games to get all our children playing sport more regularly.
“I want to use the example of the Olympics to lead a revival of competitive sport in primary schools. We need to end the 'all must have prizes’ culture and get children playing and enjoying competitive sports from a young age, linking them up with sports clubs so they can pursue their dreams.”
That's what the Telegraph says he said. For good measure on The Today Programme he dismissed alternatives such as Indian dancing, saying that he had nothing against it, but it wasn't a substitute for sport.
The enthusiasts for school sport produce various arguments in its favour. There is the general health and fitness, anti-obesity school of thought. That's fine. I've no problems with that. There is the We must build on the legacy to produce future generations of Olympic medals winners brigade. That's rather more sinister. Coercing your citizens into sporting excellence for glory of the nation is something I associate with totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, and I'd rather we didn't take it up in this country. Then there is the argument that sport builds your character. Some of the men (they are always men) spouting away on the radio have gone so far as to claim that competitive team sport teaches you lessons you cannot learn elsewhere. Not in acting in plays, or forming a band, or entering a school science competition, or founding a magazine, or helping out local old people, or entering a chess league. Nope, if you don't do competitive team sport you will grow up a stunted human being, incapable of team work.
I hated sport at school. It is thirty two years since I left, and my deep, searing hatred of rounders, netball and gym lessons is still burnt into my psyche. I have poor eye-hand cordination, lousy proprioception, and an inbuilt tendency to become ten times more stiff, tense, and uncordinated if other people are looking at me while I try to accomplish any physical task I find difficult. If they are commenting on and criticizing my efforts in public the torture is complete.
Rounders is a rubbish game. You are supposed to hit a missile smaller than a tennis ball with a bat no thicker than a cucumber. I could not hit the ball. I couldn't even see the ball. Then you have to run. I never made it past first base, since I hadn't wacked the ball to the boundary. The rest of the time while your team is batting you stand about in a queue, and when your team is fielding you stand about on the field of play, desperately hoping, if you are me, that the ball doesn't come anywhere near you, because if it does you will have to catch it. I couldn't catch it, and if I did I couldn't throw it. I never picked up the art of throwing overarm instinctively, like Palestinian children on the TV seem to have done when they hurl stones at the Israeli army, and nobody ever taught me. As an aerobic workout it was useless, consisting of approximately 95 per cent standing about, coupled with 100 per cent humiliation and dire boredom.
Netball was worse. The ball was much larger, almost as big as a football, and people were throwing it directly at your head. And the captains got to pick teams. I was invariably the last or second last child to be picked, sharing the honour of class dunce with a sweet natured girl called Debbie. Hockey wasn't quite as bad since it happened mainly on the ground (it was a low grade girls' game) and I could just about follow the ball enough to make contact with it some of the time. I played in defence, where having a stocky build and reasonably tough nerves came in useful. Worse were the days when it rained too much for hockey, and we had to do country dancing instead. There were 31 girls in the class, and I hoped desperately that someone would be ill, because if there were an odd number of pupils in the session I would be the one dancing with the gym teacher, having a couple of groups I sometimes hung out with, but no particular friend.
Tennis. Ah, tennis. Tennis bored me to idiocy. It still does. My grandmother used to watch it on the TV, and I was utterly, completely mystified as to why anybody wanted to spend their time looking at that stuff. I could scarcely hit a tennis ball, even with something as large as a tennis racket, and when I did it might go practically anywhere. I couldn't get the hang of serving. I would have been unutterably crap at tennis under any circumstances, but was made slightly worse by the fact that my mother, having no interest in it herself and perceiving that I wasn't into it either, bought me the cheapest possible tennis racket. It weighed a ton, had a handle so thick you could scarcely close your hand around it, and I don't think had a sweet spot on it anywhere. God, I hated tennis. The school only ran to one sports teacher for this class of 31, so the children that showed no interest or aptitude didn't receive any remedial instruction.
Gym. I have saved the worst until last. I once received a school report that said that my floor work was imaginative but that my vaulting lacked spring, which is the only amusing thing ever to have come out my time doing compulsory PE. I was a fat child, the youngest, shortest and heaviest in the class. Somersaults made me dizzy. I presume they upset my inner ears. I couldn't climb ropes, because my fat little legs lacked the strength. The most frightening thing was the parallel bars, when we were made to drop from the upper bar to the lower one, catching ourselves with an outstretched arm. Given my lack of eye-hand coordination and, at that stage, undiagnosed short sight, it is a marvel that I didn't ever miss the lower bar with my hand and land on it with my face instead. The most humiliating thing was having to stand in front of the whole class, with my fat legs and fat bottom, in my knickers. I did not get fitter, standing at the bottom of a rope I couldn't climb, but I learned the art of suffering acute public embarassment.
So, Prime Minister Mr David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Radio 4 pundits, and everybody else climbing on the Olypmics bandwagon and saying that all children must do sport every day, and that they must be team sports, not dancing, or Pilates, or Yoga, or spinning. That is what your compulsory sport did for my fitness, my self-esteem, my ability to cooperate and my character while I was growing up. That is what you would like to inflict on all of the unsporty children of today, instead of finding them an alternative that they do enjoy and that might improve their health and fitness.
Actually, sport was character building for me in one way, just not the one that Boris et al probably had in mind. Having learned at a tender age what it feels like to have a compulsory activity looming, which you cannot escape, which you hate, which you are bad at, which exposes you to ridicule, at which you never improve and nobody ever offers you extra assistance and coaching even though you find it so difficult and are so bad at it, I am more compassionate than I might be otherwise to the academically dull. People who never learned to read and write, hated school, bunked off it sometimes, left as soon as they could, because every day was a repeated obstacle course of stuff that you didn't get and nobody helped you to get it, and you had to keep failing in public. I see where they might be coming from, because I have been there myself. But there should be better ways of teaching empathy than making children miserable for two hours a day, five days a week.
One of the things that the sporty types don't get is that some of us non-sporty ones are really not interested in competitive. Never mind learning that everyone can't have prizes and that it's not the end of the world if I don't get a medal, I don't even want a medal. I just don't want to be there. As well as not getting sport, I don't get card games, board games, word games, or pub quizzes. The only computer game I like is Sim City, and that has no winners or losers and no fixed rules, apart from the fact that you mustn't go bust. This complete lack of ritualised competitive ethos doesn't seem to have held me back. I went to a good university, got a degree, had a series of fairly senior jobs, bought a house. When I used to do the sort of job where you get appraisals I was regularly commended for my brilliant teamwork. Enthusiasm for games, in any form, and ability to get on with real life don't seem strongly correlated. Nor is lack of sportiness an inevitable predictor of obesity and sloth. I have a BMI of 21.6, and can lift over a third of my own body weight or comfortably walk twelve miles in half a day. I didn't get like that by doing sport, but by doing physical things that I enjoy, mostly gardening and walking about. In fact, the key physical discipline I would like to see taught in schools is Pilates. Most people are going to do sedentary jobs and a lot of them are going to develop back problems, so learning good posture and core muscle strength at a young age would be more valuable than any amount of netball and shinning up ropes.
The only comfort for today's non-sporty children is that once the rush of the Olympics is over, all this promised compulsory sport probably won't happen.
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