The Bad Back Olympics

Not so with my spine. For the past six weeks it has been unwilling to comply with even the simplest requests. "Hey," says brain "let's go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea!". "No way!" says spine scornfully. "In fact," it continues imperiously, "if you try to move at all, I'm going inject so much pain into nervous system that you're going to think long and hard before you even try blinking again".

I've had a bad back, is what I'm saying in a roundabout way. Not just an ordinary bad back that makes it difficult to do things for a few days, but the kind of bad back that makes you question the likelihood of ever seeing the world from a vertical position again.

One of the few things I have been able to do is watch television. For what seemed like weeks, the only thing on television was the Olympics. This did not make me happy. When putting on your socks takes an hour of sweat and painful effort, the last thing you want to see is fit, healthy people jumping effortlessly and lifting enormous weights – it just looks like showing off. "Oh very clever," I say from my position sprawled on the floor, two legs halfway into the same leg of my pants, "So you can run like a gazelle and leap over small buildings, but I bet you can't reach that sock over there!" Then the gymnastics comes on and I become convinced that, not only do I have a bad back, I seem to have far fewer joints in my limbs than the evidence of what I'm seeing would suggest is normal for the human body.

I booed throughout the closing ceremony and then settled down to wait for the Paralympics – surely these would be my kind of sportsmen. Not so. If anything, it was worse. There is nothing encouraging about a situation in which a guy with no legs is able to perform athletic feats that make you look as agile as a felled tree in comparison. The problem, I realised, was that I had become prejudiced against fit people, regardless of the number of limbs they happened to have. "Well aren't you brilliant," I found myself shouting sarcastically at the TV, "You’re very fancy with your carbon-fibre legs, but can you bend down and pick up that spoon I dropped on the floor last Tuesday?"

Clearly, the only thing that is going to satisfy me is a full-scale Olympic-style event dedicated to people with bad backs. Admittedly, the opening ceremony would probably be a lot quieter than we have become used to, given that the majority of competitors and spectators would still be at home shouting at their wives for leaving their coffee cups too far away. In fact, the first crop of gold medals would go automatically to anyone who managed to get themselves to the stadium instead of giving up half way and going back to bed.

Ideas for other events are not hard to invent. Competition in the 'Getting things down from a high shelf' challenge would be stiff, literally. After weeks of training, I see myself in the running for a medal in 'Putting a shirt on inside out, taking it off and putting it back on again while swearing' and my 100-metre shuffle times can be expected to break the 30-minute barrier. Water events would have to be avoided – once you get someone with a bad back floating in a swimming pool, it's almost impossible to persuade them to get out again short of releasing live sharks.

Once the Bad Back Olympics has become a global success, I have several other ideas for involving sections of the population that currently feel excluded. These include: the Olympics for People Who Don't Really Know the Rules, the Diffident Olympics, the Olympics for Poor Losers and, possibly, the Polish Olympics, with winners receiving Amber Gold.

Jamie Stokes