Last weekend, we had our sports festival at UraJitsu. It was only the junior high as the high school had had theirs the week before. There's only two classes in each grade, so there was only first and second place. We joined the first grade and second grade together, so it was 1A and 2A (my class) against 1B and 2B.

Overall, the school is not very athletic. Because of the low student population and high academic pressure, we don't seem to attract too many jocks. While the kids are in general enthusiastic about sports, they are mostly incompetent. It's like if you made a school out of a lot of copies of me. So, most of the events weren't all that serious. We had the event where they tie your legs together and make you run a relay race. It's kinda like a 3-legged race, but they did it with 5 or 7 people, so that they could barely move except by hopping. So the winner was the team that fell over in a twisted pile the least, which wasn't my team. There was one event called the scrum relay where three people link arms behind their backs to form a circle, and try to carry a ball in the gap. I actually participated in this race, because my class has one boy fewer than 2B. But we didn't win this one either. There was a competition called the joust which, while not athletic per se, was certainly brutal. This is the one where three kids make like a horse and carry one kid on their shoulders. They try to yank the headbands off of the other guy's heads, but they mostly end up knocking each other over. We escaped with only one debilitating injury this year, but my team lost this event too. There was also a cheesy obstacle race, with such difficult challenges as ducking under a hurdle, stacking empty soda cans, and running while balancing a tennis ball on a racket. I hear that NFL tryouts use the same routine. Anyway, this event was complete chaos and I couldn't really tell who won at all. I don't think it was us though.

However, despite all this, we came out the champions! Everybody was really shocked when the results were read out. The reason that we won, I think, was because of the parents. They parents had two events, the tug of war and the thing where they throw beanbags into a basket. These are pretty normal events for parents at sports festivals, but the difference in this one was that the points counted towards the final score. And the A class parents really cleaned up in these two events. So we won. While the boys try to play everything off like they don't really care, all the girls are really earnest and put a lot into it, so they all broke out crying when they lost. And kept crying for like half an hour. Probably they learned something like even if you try your best, you will lose sometimes. Which is a good lesson for them because they are mostly pretty spoiled kids. Really, it's too bad that only half of them could lose.