Right, I thought, there is nothing for it. We were under starters orders for the climactic event of the tournament, and in just a few seconds we would be off.
My heart was pounding in my ears, lup-dup lup-dup, just like it did before the start of any critical sporting event of my youth. It was like the moment in rowing, the bumping fours or eights, before they drop the rope for the start of the race and your palms start to sweat with expectancy. It was like standing on the 22 line in rugby, and waiting to catch the ball at kick-off – knowing the entire opposition scrum is waiting to flatten you. It was tense.
I looked around the village green, where the sports day was taking place. It was lovely – a light breeze riffling the foliage; a blue sky; the sun beaming down on Oxfordshire. But there was no escape.
The mums were eyeing me sceptically. The dads were limbering up and getting ready to join me on the starting line. My son was watching me with what I took to be pride – little knowing, poor chap, of the turmoil within my breast.
You see, I had no idea, when I volunteered to go to the sports day cum prize-giving, that there would be parental involvement. If I had been warned that there was going to be a fathers’ sack race, I might well have found an excuse to stay away. But now I was stepping into the hessian bag – and it was unclear, frankly, whether I would get out of it alive.
I had done it before, mind you, and I felt I knew the essentials. The trick of the sack race is to bunch the fabric firmly in front of you and hold it high with one arm, then use the other to wave yourself forward with every bounce. Then the key thing about bouncing forwards is to take your time with each leap.
Don’t just boing along like a toy. Jump forward as far as you can; gather yourself; and then explode again. It’s like skiing or boxing or tennis – it’s all in the knees. Yup, I felt I could cope with the technicalities of this great and famous sport of sack-racing, whose rules were no doubt invented – like all the world’s great sports – in this country.
I had the wiles of someone who has spent years in saccodromology. On the other hand, maybe it was by now too many years. I looked down the row of dads, fit young TV executives and start-up kings; local farmers and tech gurus. I noted their lean and rangy physiques.
Not only was I by far the heaviest (and fattest) contestant, I was also – there is no easy way to admit this – the oldest, by at least two decades. In this competition I am afraid I was a living anachronism, a coelacanth – yet I could tell my fellow contestants were going to give me no quarter. They were going to hop like crickets, and if I expired of a cardiac infarct – well that was my problem.
So that was the question that buzzed in my brain, as a silence fell and the very birds stopped chirping, and it felt as if the whole universe was raptly concentrating on the start of this race.
Should I really go for it? Should I bust a gut – probably literally – and abandon my last shred of dignity in an effort to win the race? Or should I sort of pretend that it didn’t really matter – and that it was all about the sheer fun of taking part?
I raise this question now, because we are in the season of sports days. Across the country grown men and women are being drawn into athletic competitions for which they have not trained for years, if ever. Whole disused muscle systems are being suddenly pushed into service.
Hamstrings are snapping like gunshots. Tiny tots are crying with terror as half-drunk parents careen over the finishing line, unable to stop, and knock over the tables that have been laid for tea. The grass is sticky with albumen from the pratfalls of the egg and spoon.
Sometimes the damage is being done by the mums, but mostly the carnage is caused by the dads – the competitive dads; the dads who simply cannot get over the loss of their juvenile strength and elasticity; who believe in their hearts that they are as strong and as fast as ever they were, and who believe they have found, in the school sports day, the ideal moment to prove it.
Are you a competitive dad? Do you know any competitive dads? I hope so, because this is the moment to sing their praises. We need them, in all their magnificent absurdity.
The truth about our kids is that most of them – as far as I can see – are absolutely bursting with competitive spirit. I remember my pride and amazement in 2012 when this country – Team GB – came third in the Olympics; and how in the following Games, in Rio, we actually came second!
Second in the whole world – for a country that represents around 0.8 per cent of the global population. True, we have slipped a bit under Labour – down to 7th in 2024, and our chances certainly won’t be helped by the current government’s insane war on fee- paying schools (which produce roughly a third of our medallists).
But my point still holds: we have many young people with the courage, grit and mental strength to win – at the very highest level. Many of them take inspiration from the spirit of their parents.
Look at the story of many great athletes: there is almost always a competitive dad in the background. So with that in mind I gazed again at my son, as he stood there near the starting line, and wondered what to do.
Could I be humiliated in front of him? I was a veteran sack-race artist, but I was also showing signs of anno domini. I could not expect to bounce with the tiggerish verticality of these younger dads.
To judge by their winking and their sly, sniggering looks, they knew it. I thought perhaps I should ask for a few yards head start – but then fought it down.
Pathetic. The honour of the Johnson family was at stake. Then I had it – an inspiration!
If I couldn’t handicap my rivals, I would seize the moral advantage and handicap myself. Seizing my son, I put him on my shoulders and – on your marks, get set, go – we were off.
You may not believe it but I was actually quite fast at sprinting, once upon a time, and as the red mist came down and we lolloped across the grass, there was a moment when I actually thought we would win.
No such luck. We came last, though not by much, and anyway: we had two in our sack; they only had one. It was a clear moral victory.
Yup, it turns out being good in the sack is like so much else in life. Sometimes speed is less important than guile and experience.
