I was an Olympic Champion....

...in my own backyard.

We would get Olympic fever EVERY year instead of every 4 years. All of us (Pam Billy, Rhonda, Rusty, Sissy) would start to train for the upcoming Olympics every summer. We were sure we would be gold medalists in the decathlon because we held our own mini decathlons in the backyard.

We had a Point system and everything. I think it was 1st - 10
2nd. - 8
3rd. - 6
4th - 4 ... etc.
Everybody that participated got at least one point and everyday there would be other kids in the neighborhood participating. Everybody had their strong points so it almost evened out in a way because we showed no mercy to the little ones. We couldn't. Once we started "do overs" we would be "do overing" all day long. So we didn't do "do overs" unless a parent would show up to protest and then as soon as they left it was "no do overs" again.

My strong points were wiffleball homeruns and the marathon. Our marathons were who ever ran the longest won.
Billy was the bike riding champ.
Rhonda and Rusty would duke it out for the free throw championships.
Rusty won the weightlifting automatically. Having the event was just a formality.
Sissy was a champ at crossing the bars. Only the big boys could beat her and sometimes not even then.

I remember on day we were having a high jumping event. We judged it by how high you could touch. We forgot that we were bigger and Rhonda and Sis were much shorter than the rest of us. One day we declared Rusty and winner and Wimpy was there. He started laughing. He pointed out that Rusty was taller and only jumped a couple of inches off the ground to touch the highest. Poor Sis was half his height and could almost touch as high as he did. So Wimpy declared Sis the winner which was actually fair. I think we stopped doing the high jump after that because we realized we couldn't accurately judge it and we did try to be fair.

We did have a long jump though to see who could jump the farthest. We had 100 yard dashes (or however long the yard was). We had Basketball and Wiffleball. There was the long jump and the bicycle marathon. The bar cross on the gymset as well as our version of the parallel bars (which were hooked on to the end of the gymset.

It was great fun and it would take all day to host our events and if we happened to finish we would take a break and have a monopoly game.