So surely everyone in the world knows that the 2016 Olympic Games are currently taking place in Rio. I absolutely love the Olympics, I find myself becoming very passionate about sports and athletes that I otherwise wouldn't. I can remember during the London 2012 Olympics being glued to the screen as I cheered for Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah, supporting Team GB in every sport (admittedly except gymnastics where I was rooting for Team USA).
Anyway, I am not a particularly sporty person these days. It's too hard and awkward to try to get into a new sport as a beginner at this age in my opinion, plus there is just a lack of time and money... sigh. sigh sigh sigh. However, as a child I dabbled in many a sport. Whenever the Olympic games come around I get to thinking about what could have been. I mean I am not saying that had I stuck in at any of these sports I would have been at an Olympic standard but what can i say... I'm a dreamer! So here are some stories about my life as a sporting enthusiast, pre-adulthood, pre-netflix and pre-snackingmylifeaway.
Horse Riding
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Myself and Surprise after a riding
school show jumping competition |
I began my horse riding journey when I was roughly 5 or 6 years old. My parents bought me a hack (or trek or trail ride or magical horse back adventure) at the local riding school as a Christmas present. I rode a little pony called Popple and after continuously harping on and on about how much I enjoyed it I began attending regular riding lessons, at first once a week and then later twice a week. The next Christmas my cousin had outgrown her pony and this pony (Kipper who was a little Welsh pony) became mine - hoorah #bestpresentever! My other cousin gave my mum her horse (George, breed=crazy) to my mother. One day we went out a trail ride together, my dad led me and after George decided he was too afraid to cross the river my mother attempted to take him round another route that avoid the river. She trotted off in the opposite direction from us and then she cantered and then galloped. My dad commented about how fast my mum was going in pure awe. We saw her pass behind some trees and then we saw George emerge from behind these trees minus my mother, we can look back and laugh at it now. Anyways, we had to sell George because we didn't know shit about horses. Over the years I read up on everything I needed to know about ponies, Kipper and I adventured around out field, I got more and more lessons and then i outgrew Kipper. My little sister took Kipper over as her own and my parents bought me my favourite pony from the riding school (Surprise, breed=connemara x new forest x unicorn) for my Christmas (it sounds like my family were rich but we were actually pretty poor, probs because of the horses tbh). Anyway, with surprise I gained a lot of experience in general riding, jumping and (unintentional) rodeo, lol she was cray (and much like myself, scared as shit of everything). I did a little competing at local jumping competitions (jumping roughly 65cm high fences, the fences at the Olympics are 1.6m-2.0m lol). I never got to fullfill my dreams of competing properly in any equestrian events due to a few reasons:
- Money - its expensive AF to compete. You need to be able to afford a horse box, the entry fees and if you want to compete professionally you need a proper expensive horse, the fees of stabling this horse and then to pay for lessons.
- Surprise was a slightly older, ex-riding school pony and I hadn't has lessons since I was a pre-teen so....
- Transport (see point 1)
As exams approached, parental pony funds dwindled and my teenage growth spurt peeked we had to sell our horses (minus Kipper because he had been in our family for over 30 years). Kipper stayed with us until the day he died, at an unknown age but probably approaching 40. Surprise remained the unicorn of my dreams forever more, she died shortly after Kipper at an age of probably mid 20s/approaching 30? She didn't look a day over 12 in my eyes. Anyway, horse riding was the sport I stuck with the most, it will always be my fave but it's super expensive and honestly once you've owned your own horse attending lessons at a local riding school is boring and lame and will never compare.
Judo
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Currently can't find a pic of my in my judo getup
so here is a pic from my cycling career |
So for about a year when I was nearing the end of high school I began attending a Judo class with my mum. It was good fun and I was surprisingly good at it for the tiny little thing I was. I picked up the moves pretty quickly but I never took the time to learn the names of the throws or holds which made progressing up the belts hard. Ultimately I quit Judo before starting high school after a boy from my class saw me at my judo class. I felt really embarrassed about the fact that I did judo all of a sudden and I decided to quit a week or two later. Before quitting I had attended a good few competitions and more times than not I found myself winning trophies or medals for my weight group. Looking back I think I could have gotten pretty good if I had stuck in at it but it was not meant to be.
Gymnastics
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Again no pics of my gymnastics career but here
is another horse pic...
#soaring #flying |
I attended a small gymnastics class when I was very young and liked it but then the friends that I went with were convinced to move to a different club and I went with them. The new club was very different. They were very serious and clearly more legit but suddenly gymnastics wasn't fun and I found myself being scared to go. Eventually I decided to quit because at that age competing wasn't really something I thought of, I just went to sports clubs to have fun and to learn new things. Ultimately I returned to gymnastics after quitting judo and it was a lot of fun, once again pretty unlegit and I think we spend whole lessons doing forward roles and cartwheels... I met a girl who was also going to be starting at the same high school as me and we continued going to the class until we had been in high school for a few months. It was clearly a child's class and I'm almost 100% certain that my friend and I were only allowed to keep going because the 'coach' felt too awks to ask us to leave. The closest to Olympics style gymnastics I got was jumping on a spring board and doing a straddle jump over a vault... I guess also walking over an upturned gym bench which I think was mean to mirror a beam...
I do look back and wonder if I would have become the next British Gabby Douglas or Simone Biles had I stuck in at the scary horrible gymnastics club all of those years ago... I mean 100% I would not have but I would have been that little bit more likely to if I had stuck in.
Swimming
As many parents do my parents sent me to swimming lessons as a child in case I fell into a
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May have been a shit swimming but
still managed to become a life guard... |
pool, canal or particularly deep puddle while out on one of my many childhood adventures. This was all good and well and even though I was never the strongest swimmer nor was I by any means a fast swimmer, I could keep myself afloat and I knew the basics of front crawl, back crawl and breast stroke and that was all fine. Then when I started high school my mum decided to sign me up for a swimming club because at this point the only sport I did was horse riding and I mean I had my own horse so it wasn't like I was actually taking any sort of sport lessons or such. The problem with this swimming club was that it turned out to be less of a club and more of a swimming lessons sort of thing. After attending for a few weeks I found out that the other people in my lessons were the younger siblings of my class mates and I instantly refused to go back. I failed to progress to the next level at the end of term due to low attendance and I decided to blank the whole thing out of my mind as much as possible, praying no one at school would find out that my mum had accidentally signed me up for near enough beginner swimming lessons. I was more than happy to end my swimming career hear, the humiliation was too much and tbh tarnished the shole sport for me... every time I so much as see a pool I have PTSD style flashbacks.
Dancing
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Okay I have no digital copies of pics from my yesteryears...
Here's another equestrian one... |
As a child I did every dance class imaginable - tap, ballet, highland, jazz, disco, dirty, break, river... you get the point. All of them, name a style and I did it... It was fabulous and I was basically on my way to playing the black, white AND rainbow coloured swan. Then a new girl turned up to class, asked me if I wanted to be friends, I said yes and she led me astray (this was the beginning of the end of my dance career). We began to find playing games and having races around the hall more exciting than the dancing. Eventually I dropped out of dance class and through the years I went back to dance summer programmes (one year we learned a fun dance to Jenny From The Block and performed it to all the parents) and there was even a brief spell in P.E class in high school where I chose to take dance for a semester - it was awful, just a bunch of the 'popular' girls and the really slutty P.E teacher making a fool of themselves to Love and Sex and Magic by JT. My friend and I decided to do our own thing but mostly we sat and bitches about the other members of our class as they, along with the teacher, would grind their way around the 'dance studio' which was just the school cafeteria + a mirror and ballet bar.
Okay so I never even got close to being a professional dancer and dance on it's own is not an Olympic sport but I just wanted to put it out there that the only reason I never succeeded in dance and the reason my life never as and probably never will amount to anything was all due to that one demon child leading me astray when I was 5 years old.
So there you have it. I never made it to the Olympics for 3 reasons and 3 reasons alone:
- I'm too poor
- My mother never forced me to stick with or commit to anything as a child (bar the one sport we couldn't actually afford)
- I was too easily distracted/all I wanted to do was have fun (until the sun came up on thr Santa Monica boulevard)
Maybe one day I will magically find out that I am naturally really good at something like rowing or fencing but in reality I wont and I'll probably die never amounting to half as much as the 16-20 year old gymnasts that I spent last night watching kick ass in Rio and that's life isn't it.
Anyway the moral of the story is: her name is Mary, he hair is attractively arranged.
xoxo
