Leading up to the Athens Olympics talk mostly centered upon the apparent Greek tradition of leaving stuff to the last minute. There was even an ad for Potato chips (Australian I think) where there were a bunch of workmen sitting on wheelbarrows eating the chips while the runners on the track behind them tripped over shovels and piles of dirt… falling in to holes. You know, the usual race shenanigans. As it turned out, the venues and whatnot appear to have been completed on time. Nothing like the last minute to motivate you!
I’ve always liked watching the Olympics… but never really had aspirations of someday being an Olympic athlete. My sports experiences led me in a direction most definitely away from actual athletic competition – at least on a competent level (except golf). In my high school we sampled many of the summer olympic sports, at least the track and field types….
Archery
I wasn’t half bad at archery… except the part where hitting the center of the target was necessary. My form was excellent, however. The grass behind the targets were well aerated after I was done. I sneezed once, and the arrow shot up into the air and cleared the sports field, into parts unknown.
Running
Running and I do not get along. As an adult I find it boring, as a teenager it was less boring but I wasn’t especially good at it (long distance running anyway – sprinting was cool). Right after archery we went for a run. Over the fence at the back of the field we found some Raspberry pickers in the field gathered around a post that had someone’s jacket hanging from it – with my errant arrow right through it. I quickly moved on. My running incidents as an adult are more noteworthy though. As an adult I have had incidents with running into trees, falling into ditches, and having a shoe fly off in the dark which took 10 minutes to find. There may or may not have been an incident involving a parked car….
Discus
Now this was a fun sport… twirl twirl twirl throw. Piece of cake right? So we were shown this… we lined up. People twirled, people threw, but nobody managed to get it very far. Then I stepped up.. I twirled. I threw. Even the teacher acknowledged he’d never seen ANYBODY throw a discus so far!!!! 🙂 Right into the parking lot….
And last but not least – Volleyball
I used to love volleyball – and I had an awesome jump overhand serve. It went in every time. It was very hard to return. I was also awesome at setting. Get me near the net, however, and all hell broke loose. I once went up for a spike, hit the ball hard and in bounds, but got my hand wrapped into the highest square of the net and was left hanging there by one arm. They had to take the whole net down to get me out. I do not know what was worse – the sore wrist I had for days afterwards or the 3 minutes of hanging there while others attempted to free me without collapsing the net.