‘Sports day had been delightful up to the point the parents had to race…’

The video is 16 seconds long and it starts well. Really well. I break away from the chasing pack early. Christ, I’m a metre ahead of everyone else. It’s not even close. There’s a majesty to my movements. Nobility, poise, drive. I’m pinging across that scrubland like a pellet of fat on a heated pan and as I reach the turning point I’m showing my competitors – nay, my enemies – nothing but a clean pair of heels. This footage shows someone operating at maximum human potential, throwing his arms and legs at the laws of physics and beating them to a pulp. To watch it, dear reader, is to believe a man can fly.

We’ll stop the footage there, around the four-second mark, to appreciate my achievement thus far. I’m not the fittest man in three counties, and it’s fair to say I’ve added a little density to my figure over the past few years. Ardent fans will be gladdened to know that there is, in fact, approximately 15% more of me than there was before I had kids. The exercise I do is moderate in effort, conservative in pace and infrequent in occurrence. My attitude to food and wine is basically, yes. And yet here, at my three-year-old daughter’s nursery sports day, I am gliding like a gazelle.

I did know there would be a parents’ race at this event, but had not intended to take part. I’ve seen some of the other parents. Many of them seem offensively young and fit. I certainly hadn’t dressed for the occasion, taking to the field after much cajoling from my wife, in khaki slacks and skate trainers. Others, of course, were more devious. My alarm bells should have been ringing when I clocked how many parents were garbed in running shorts and carbon-fibre sneakers. Some were pulling secretive stretches and I pondered elaborate fantasies of them arriving on-site after quaffing multiple isotonic energy gels in the car.

Things were, therefore, stacked against me as I perched at the starting line and surveyed the younger, fitter competitors waiting for the whistle. Admittedly, this cohort also included people in flipflops and at least three dads holding actual babies – a cynical move you might say, from cowards less worried about losing than losing face against natural-born winners like me.

I suppose it’s worth saying that the sports day had been delightful up to this point, albeit mostly centred on the indifferent athletic abilities of a bunch of toddlers. My daughter had performed admirably in the partnered relay (walking slightly quickly while holding hands with a friend) and the ice-cream race (walking slightly quickly while holding a plastic ice-cream cone). It was in her final race that she truly excelled, however; an agonising sprint undertaken with a bean bag on her head and conducted at roughly the speed of continental drift.

Each event was overseen by a kindly man in athletic gear, clearly hired to teach sports to the kids, who spent the afternoon holding a whistle and trying to marshal some form of coherence to proceedings. This was, in the end, impossible, and it’s likely they could have spared the expense of his participation by asking a random labrador to perform the same task. There were a few tears, more than a few runs undertaken hand-in-hand with nursery workers – with points, I’d hope, deducted – and medals for everyone. Each of my daughter’s events were routinely, and charmingly, interrupted by her pausing to wave manically at her mum and me, as we cheered her on and wondered how we’d cut down all the footage we were recording, since each 12m length she undertook was taking up multiple minutes on our phones’ memory cards.

It is not that footage, however, which has been shared far and wide in the week since. No, that would be the parents’ race, which has now been seen by every mum and dad across eight parishes. Five seconds into said video, the seeds of my destruction become apparent. My turnaround is, I’ll admit, inelegant. My belly ripples as it follows my spine, tailing it by roughly one second, like a pot roast on a stripper’s pole. Then – and I only note this crime in writing, having taken advice from the Metropolitan Police – I am cruelly hip-checked by another dad, rendering me so off-balance as we embark on the final stretch, that a slow descent begins.

And I do mean slow. It is a fall that takes place in chapters. The fall of a man who cannot believe he is falling. The fall of a man who regrets making an enemy of physics. For what feels like a long, wet fortnight, I stumble, trip and finally land flat on my arse, to the delight of the watching crowd.

My daughter cheers. My wife is laughing so hard I think she might soon be sick. I am on my feet before anyone can offer me a hand, and look over to see that Paul, a parent I would have previously described as a friend, has been gamely filming all of this for posterity.

As I walk toward their chuckling faces, a kind and discerning mum asks if I did it for the column. “Yes,” I say. “Of course I did!” Do not print anything else. The true secret to winning, after all, is to never lose face.

Main image by Alamy; video stills from Paul Winrow-Giffin