The Madhouse Beyond Sports Day

I think far too much emphasis is placed on sporting achievement in this country.

There, I said it. Don't get me wrong, I could never run the 100m in under 10 seconds like some of the top athletes in the world can, and this amazing ability should be congratulated. But likewise, I bet Usain Bolt couldn't build and set up a PC in under an hour. I can, but I don't get a gold medal for it, it's just what I do. I used to know a guy who can solve the Rubik's cube in under 30 seconds. Everyone has something they can do better than anyone else, but most of these achievements go un-noticed unless it involves sport.

It begins at school. I was always the fat geeky kid (some say I still am.) Nothing used to piss me off more than having to trowpse out onto the field on sports day and cheer on an elite community of pupils who happened to be good at PE. What's so special about PE anyway, and why does it deserve its own day? I don't recall the entire school being marched into a hall to watch me and all the other A* maths students doing hard sums on a blackboard for an afternoon, why not a maths, or history, or art day rather than a sports day? Translate this into adulthood and I get moaned at for being a miseryguts because I refuse to cheer my national side in a game of football, or some other sporting event such as the Olympics. Some go so far as to call me unpatriotic. Well, excuse me, I'd much rather be working on something innovative to improve the quality of human life, or writing ranty letters to my MP about the fact that hospitals and schools are being sidelined in favour of millionaires' salaries. You know - things that actually matter, as opposed to a ball game. I'll happily cheer on sportspeople doing their job when hordes of adoring fans turn up at my place of work and start cheering me on.

Of course there are two knock-on effects to this collective over-celebration of sport. One of these, fittingly enough, harks back to the last paragraph - the financial issue. We could be paying doctors and schoolteachers higher salaries for the sterling work they do, but instead we as a country are blowing millions on a massive international sports day that we can't really afford. Even other non-essential things don't get the same treatment as sport. Compare the Eurovision Song Contest to the Olympics - they're both the same, massive national expenditure for something that doesn't really matter, yet viewing figures for the former will likely be dwarfed by the latter. I suspect many of the people who take the piss out of me for watching Eurovision have taken time off work to watch live international football, stayed up late to watch sport in other time zones and will no doubt be glued to their televisions come the Olympics. It seems that everything is acceptable provided it's sport, otherwise it's just sad.

The second effect of (or possibly reason for) sport being so universally adored is the celebrity effect. Maurice Wilkes has done more for this country than Bobby Charlton ever will, but I bet if you have to google either of them it won't be the latter. I have to listen to football fans droning on and on about the one time our national team was above-mediocre enough to win the world cup, completely ignoring the dozens of failures before and since, but you don't hear us nerds worshipping Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the web, for example. Nobody mentions Berners-Lee, or Wilkes, or Charles Babbage, or Alan Turing... heck, I know people who can name every player who's played for England in the last decade but couldn't tell you who designed the Colossus, and that practically won us a world war, not just a poxy game of football.

So what do I suggest? Am I calling for the eternal damnation of anything physical? No, of course not. As I said first of all, exceptional ability should be celebrated. But all exceptional ability. If you consider someone impressive because they can run fast, jump high or win trophies, then don't belittle those whose ability is less - well - televised. And let's stop getting so worked up over things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. I can name every pokemon, that's considered sad. If pokemon were a sport, it would be considered 'passion'. So watch the Olympics, or Euro 2012, or Wimbledon, or fucking Dancing on Ice if you like, it doesn't bother me - just accept that I really don't give a shit, and stop calling me grumpy.