But could it be the case that some of us are looking back at school sports with misplaced nostalgia? Think of the miserable British winters out on the cold sports field running laps around the pitch. That time you were picked last for the school hockey match, that rainy afternoon the school bully tackled you with such force you vowed to never pick up a rugby ball again.
Stephen Fry recalled his hatred of school sports and the creative excuse he made up to get out of them in an open letter:
"I do not think there has ever been a schoolboy with such overmastering contempt, fear, dread, loathing, and hatred for "games" – for sport, exercise, gymnastics and physical exertions of all or any kinds. Every day I would wake up with a sick jolt wondering just how I might get out of that day's compulsory rugby, cricket, hockey, swimming or whatever foul healthy horror was due to be posted on the notice-board that morning. The catalogue of multiple lies, evasions, self-imposed asthma attacks and other examples at what Edwardian school fiction characterised as "lead-swinging", malingering and "cutting". All the acts of a cad, a swine, a rotter, an outsider and a beast."
For Charlie Brooker, school sports were torturous as well. He wrote:
"In my eyes, PE was a twice-weekly period of anarchy during which the school's most aggressive pupils were formally permitted to dominate and torment those they considered physically inferior. Perhaps if the whole thing had been pitched as an exercise in interactive drama intended to simulate how it might feel to live in a fascist state run by thick schoolboys – an episodic, improvised adaptation of Lord of the Flies in uniform sportswear – I'd have appreciated it more. But no."
Even JK Rowling gave Harry Potter a gift for school sports because she had none: "I was very bad in sports," she admits, "so I gave Harry a talent I would really loved to have. Who wouldn't want to fly?"
So what are your memories of school sports? And what do you think of David Cameron's attempt to introduce more competition for today's pupils?
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