#123. Lucky Shot at the Olympics (Friday, September 29, 2000)
What was your best day…of getting the glory for something completely undeserved?
This day came about thanks to one of the best teacher moments from my elementary school years. We were studying the Olympics for our Media unit that term; and so, upon popular request, the teachers organized a spontaneous “mini-Olympics” for all the fifth and sixth grade classes to compete against each other in various athletic events—for an entire Friday.
The six classes would represent the six continents1, and there would be six events: 100-meter dash, 4 x 100 meters relay, synchronized swimming (i.e. synchronized dancing), discus (i.e. Frisbee), rowing (i.e. scooter board racing), and biathlon (i.e. racing around the field trying to hit teachers with water balloons). Each of them was held in sequence with all 150-plus kids watching. And Mr. Tonelli had the whole outdoor speaker system set up to do an opening and closing ceremony and give play-by-play.
For our class, I chose discus as my event because my new friend Derek Dunlop was also doing it—which annoyed him a little (it was mostly one-sided at first). But upon my insistence, we did end up “training” together, which mostly involved us chucking the Frisbee at each other and horsing around.
Mini-Olympics day did not get off to a good start. In the first three events, our class failed to medal.2 Then, during lunch hour, Derek and I’s “training” led to him falling on his shoulder and telling me to “scratch him off the discus list”.
But he sucked it up and was ready when the discus event on the baseball diamond came next. Before starting, Mr. Tonelli announced that in addition to the medals there was a “secret spot” on the diamond that if we hit we’d get an extra point. Which, in the context of the Olympics theme, was really out of place.
Anyways, when it came to my turn with the Frisbee, I kind of flung it at a bad angle, the bottom fell out a few meters away, and it sliced into the ground. However, on this ground, at the exact place where the Frisbee fell, was a set of keys—whose clang I could hear right away. Indeed, I had hit the secret spot.
As expected, I got a lot of shocked congratulations from that group of 150-plus kids. For something so completely undeserved, it was an awesome moment.
For the rest of the event, Derek, despite his injured shoulder, barely missed the podium. He finished fourth out of twenty-four—a feat he deserved far more credit for than he got (i.e. none). For my part, I knew even then that Derek had gotten shafted hard; but of course I was too busy still soaking up the glory for the next few weeks to ever say anything.
And if you’re looking for some kind of justice to end this story, I’m afraid that’s it. Well, except for the fact that I wasted perhaps the luckiest moment of my childhood on winning a meaningless “extra point” in a mock Olympics competition.
Though, for this list at least, that extra point was good enough.
- We were stuck with purple South America, so I had to wear my mom’s old purple fleece jacket in the sun for six hours.
- Most notably in the synchronized swimming/dancing event, for which our team of five girls had started practicing a week before anybody else. They lost to the blue North America group that did a routine they vociferously claimed had been stolen from them. High drama at the Olympics.