On Saturday in Indiana, Kate Avery became the first British athlete for 25 years to win a national US college cross-country championships, on a course looking suspiciously dry underfoot. Back home, our fields of sporting dreams have turned to mud. Emily, my daughter, is into running, and the athletics meets of summer are memories now: long afternoons at perfect, fearsome tracks, the glee and heartbreak, the sunshine and warm breezes.
On Saturday she ran a cross-country in Keighley. As each shivering child looked at the course, their faces fell. “That’s a massive hill,” Emily moaned, and it was hard to say anything encouraging that maintained a relationship with the truth. The mud was already slippery, and between the hill and a winding torture trail at the bottom it was churned ankle deep and cloying.
This is the West Yorkshire league and her club, Harrogate Harriers, compete against the likes of Keighley, Skipton, Holmfirth, Halifax: names evoking hardy youth, bred to run up hills – though now even hardy youth probably needs dragging off Instagram. They huddled on the start line before setting determinedly off.
I spent my youth playing football on unfeasibly desolate mudbaths in Manchester, so to me it’s brilliant, but watching young children wearing only vests and shorts in brutal competition, roared on by parents in puffa jackets, my wife can be counted on to gasp: “It’s like The Hunger Games.”
The atmosphere is good really; the kids realise quickly they are competing not with rivals but with their own personal best, and when they’ve done it, they are truly pleased. “Thanks for churning it up,” said their coach, Simon. The adults, it turned out, were doing four laps in the quagmire. I couldn’t help asking: why? “It’s, er, good for the soul?” he said.
Labour’s school legacy
The run was at the University Academy Keighley, a building with a vaulting entrance you could see was brand new the minute you arrived. It was finished in 2010, with modern technology, sports and other amenities used by the community, replacing a crumbling Victorian pile. The 2014 Ofsted report says the school teaches a deprived corps of students, a “well above average” proportion on free school meals and principally of Pakistani heritage, with English as their second language. It is improving, Ofsted says: behaviour is good, and “students are very proud of their academy building”. The evidence is incontrovertibly there in so many poorer areas to counter lazy rubbish about all governments being the same: new schools, libraries, thousands of Sure Start centres – many predictably closing now – built during Labour’s tenure. It was always certain that, like 1979-97, the Conservatives would leave no such legacy. It remains emblematic that 40 or so Tory ministers, educated in the most privileged hothouses, cancelled the Building Schools for the Future programme as soon as they came to power.
Keep sport simple, stupid
It happened to be on Thursday when Dave Whelan, Wigan Athletic’s owner, shared his views on Jewish people, how inoffensive he believes the word “chink” is to Chinese people, and why racist text messages sent by Malky Mackay, Wigan’s new manager, weren’t in fact racist at all. For years Thursday has been my football night, so by 8pm I was out playing the great and simple game. Sport is really for doing, not just watching, a truth too often drowned out now by commercialism. Playing sport is also the best antidote to the too often sordid business of sport. Good for the soul, surely.
@david_conn
