On Wednesday afternoon, I stumbled across a track and field meet that was taking place at Varsity Stadium. From what I could tell, the meet was for kids up to grade seven. The first thing that I watched was a high jump warm-up session for grade six boys. None of the kids had any technique, and it was easy to tell who was going to win the competition. He wore denim shorts and looked like he might be capable of leaping to the moon. The other boys, many of them still doing the next to useless scissor style jump, looked on in demoralized wonder, as this other kid, arching his back, soared over the bar time and time again.
The next event I watched was the 100-meter final for grade seven girls. All of the girls racing were black, and they exploded powerfully out of the starting blocks, tearing up the track in beautiful, muscular strides. Their concentration intense, you could hear their feet pounding the track, their chests rising and falling with their focused breathing.
I also watched the grade four girl’s 800-meter final. There were probably about ten of them competing, and they were all so young that I kind of expected them to be indifferent, running about in playful circles as if chasing butterflies. But no, they were pretty serious, and when the race started a girl in a yellow shirt took off into the lead. Running with an easy determination on her face, she looked like she could go on forever at that pace. Looking at her, you could just see that she was unbeatable, but all the same, I expected her to fade a bit toward the end, having opened up such a lead. However, when she got to about 75 meters from the finish line, she reached back and found another gear, sprinting through the finish line, her pigtails trailing behind her like streamers.