The Stars of Track and Field
Hurdling physicality, far from Olympic glory.
When you’re a kid, you think you can do anything. You can be an astronaut like Sally Ride, you can be president (or at least a vice-presidential nominee like Geraldine Ferraro), you can be a princess like Grace Kelly, you can be an actress, an opera singer, a supermodel. Maybe one day the back of the wardrobe will open up. The world is yours, the world is yours.
Growing older is a continual process of disillusionment. First, you learn that magic isn’t real, so you can’t be a good witch (or a bad one). Then you realize that you can’t carry a tune, so no opera or arena tours for you. You’re not tall enough to model. You have to, like, actually understand science to be an astronaut — so unfair. And who’d want to marry royalty after what Lady Di went through?
Yet even as you realize your body is not growing the way you want it to (like Kate Moss, obviously), your body is still not grown. It hasn’t started betraying you; you still have all the energy and flexibility in the world. So while you realize you can’t have everything you want — you won’t ever fly, and you can’t get enough votes for a seat on student council — there’s still the promise of the one thing that you can get, if you just practice and practice and try and try again: You can be good at sports.
Believing in my youthful athletic ability now seems as ludicrous to me as my belief in fairies as a six-year-old. Actually, that’s unfair — for all I know, fairies might actually exist. But when you grow up in WASP culture, you are required to learn sports. And when you attend a private school, you are required to play sports. And in these milieus, you are told over and over, by well-meaning parents and gym teachers and coaches, that you, too, could be an Olympic swimmer or the next Jennifer Capriati or a college soccer star. All you have to do is practice.