Steve fucking Backley.
Somehow my school managed to arrange a visit from Olympic silver medalist Steve Backley to give us training with Javelin, which I suppose was logical.

However, they only had a limited number of spaces and therefore they decided to hold a competition. Now, Javelin was not an event I excelled at, but I was more than reasonable at throwing the long pointy thing and pretty much a shoe in to get training from a real life Olympian.

The whole year got changed into our PE kits and were herded down to the sports hall. Naturally this seemed a little odd to me, the Javelin as we all know is a big sharp pointy fucker that was much better at slamming at a great speed into grass, rather than poorly varnished Parquet flooring, but I merely assumed that we'd be having a talk before being led down to the field to perform our throws.

The sight when I stepped through that door was absolutely fucking horrific, they had a case of what appeared to be foam darts of about three feet in length with wonky foam flights. The qualities of the damn things differed greatly from foam spear to foam spear, some were more like fucking three inch thick foam boomerangs than precision instruments designed to fly gracefully through the air, some had tears in them, some had missing flights and it appeared that they were being carefully selective as to who received which.

Those with the most prowess in a wider range of disciplines were dutifully handed a clean, straight well formed Javelin as well as guidance on how to launch it as far as humanly possible in comparison with the ones which remained in the store cupboard not thirty feet away.

Others, who for whatever reason were determined would not be in the select few, were handed deformed banana devices which were designed to ensure that we didn't get training and an afternoon with someone who a few months earlier had been competing for glory at the Olympic games. To compensate for this, we were also given fuck all in the way of encouragement or advice. I wasn't called up early into the proceedings, they had a fairly random method of selecting whose turn it was to throw, which appeared to be based around getting certain people into the training session and excluding others.

When my turn came I was handed my Javelin and given my single throw. The damned thing was warped and the flights were twisted, but I gave it my all regardless. Had that been a real Javelin I'm sure I could have taken down a fucking plane, it absolutely soared and the bend actually worked in my favour! It arched into the air much higher than the angle of the throw should have realistically allowed and proceeded to curve into a reasonable trajectory and sort of floated down to land in what appeared to be around 4th greatest in distance thrown.

They didn't even both to measure the fucker.

They collected it, sat me back down and continued to get the few remaining people to try out, there were a few other throws which were somewhat interesting, starting off straight before curving towards the wall of pupils sat awaiting the announcement as to who would be progressing to receive the cherished prize, much to the amusement of everyone but the poor bastard who threw it, who had immediately failed to qualify.

To cut a long story short, they couldn't quite fix it as they had desired due to the errant and random nature of foam javelin throwing, so decided to announce the people going through as they had tried to fix it anyway. A few of us complained, moaned, whined but of course it fell completely on deaf ears. The 10 boys who went on were pretty much representative of the football team and a few people who they could not dispute at all, and the girls hockey team. Their attempts to comfort me and others who also seemed to have been royally screwed really didn't help matters at all, but I couldn't help but laugh when one of my closest friends threw up over the back seat of his car a few days later whilst being escorted away from the school disco for being shit-faced. The other PE teacher, well, in an unrelated incident, another friend decided to use his car as an obstacle during a short run and left a huge fuck off dent in the bonnet. Again, I couldn't help but laugh.

What prize cunts my teachers were.
( Muns, Thu 19 Nov 2009, 22:06, 2 replies)

Javelin
Love it!

Never chucked one before I went to Teacher Training College. Went to the Athletics Professional Studies option, and sat watching whilst poncey types in tight shorts (it was the seventies) twatting about and bunging the spear about 30m.

The tutor asked me if I fancied a go. I sprinted up., all knackers and elbows, and bunged it about 60m.

(Classic line coming up)

Y've no style lad, no style, he said, before walking away shaking his head.

Never bothered again.
( The Lone Groover has mal des nuts., Thu 19 Nov 2009, 22:15, closed)