Taking part in University Decathlon!

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Here are a few videos of me failing at various athletic events in the Hainan University decathlon. This was back in November. Me and Ben signed up all full of confidence, mistakenly believing that we would have a higher average ability over ten different events than most Hainan students. The fact that neither of us had ever tried a pole vault before, and that I had a sprained calf muscle, and that some of the students specialise in athletics for their degree didn't really phase us, but maybe it should have.

We spent the month before the competition going to the sports ground every few days to see what pieces of equipment happened to be out that we could paractise with. Health and safety was non-existent, as people would be practising javelin with people still walking across the field, and then throwing the javelin back to the people at the starting line as though it was a casual game of frisbee. In the high jump practise we saw one boy completely miss the landing mats and land straight on the floor. I saw a girl get a discus thrown towards her which landed on her foot. When the pole vault finally came out for practise opportunities, the bar fell off onto the head of the guy standing underneath it, and when Ben tried it for the first time he ended up almost upside down hanging onto the pole, which started swaying back away from the landing mats instead of towards it, and he had to land half on the mats, half off, on his side.

When the big day came, I was still suffering from a sprained thigh, so I had to forfeit most of the running events. Watching the hurdles from the sideline was like watching a comedy show, as half the kids were tripping up over every hurdle and slamming on the floor, and desperately picking themselves up again, brushing themselves off and attempting the next hurdle, only to go completely face-first over that one too! Some of them must have been feeling the pressure to do well as they had been chosen as the necessary one person from each university faculty to enter, despite not really being able to do it. The pole vault was as much of a complete joke as we were hoping it would be, as literally three of the 37 entrants made it over the first height that the bar was set at. It seemed only the most specialised people had even attempted one before, let alone being taught any basic skills or safety tips. People were falling off the pole in all directions, sometimes just throwing the pole away and trying to leap over the bar, sometimes barely jumping and just riding the pole straight into the bar, sometimes swinging out sideways and whacking their head on the stand. I'd be tempted to wonder why 37 people entered a competition involving an event that they had never tried before, if we weren't doing exactly the same thing.

For a few weeks after the competition I noticed a significant number of people walking around campus on crutches or with bandages and plasters on, when normally you see almost none. In fact I learned in class recently that the reason you don't see anyone in a wheelchair in Hainan University is that disabled people aren't allowed to come to university there! It is apparently only a few specialised universities in the whole of China where disabled people are allowed to go. On top of the compulsory military training, in Hainan every single student must pass a 200m swimming test before they can graduate, so you sometimes get brilliant students who go for four years before being refused their qualification because they can't swim well enough.

I was pleased to get fourth place in the javelin, and the funny thing was that any throw or jump that me or Ben did was accompanied by a big gasp or 'wow' from everyone watching, just because we are foreign, even though there were usually plenty of Chinese people doing better performances anyway. In the 400m, because my leg was really bad by then, I had to resort to a very slow jog around the track miles behind everyone else, waving at the crowd, and running the last 50m backwards.

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Photos

One of the International student's kids.
Representing 'the rest of the world' :-)

kids playing on the sports field
i wouldn't be surprised if there was a javelin passing overhead at this moment

Team foreigner marching to the opening ceremony in our orange team shirts
The university even provided spiked shoes for every one of us!