If geeks were Superman (we wish, right guys? Haw, haw!), sport – and almost any physical activity, really – would be our kryptonite. Movies, videogames and our sweaty imaginations allow us to vicariously brutalise evil-doers and win the heart of Lois Lane, but doing things with our actual bodies usually ends disastrously.

And sport just serves to highlight our tragic physical inadequacies. It’s our latent mal-coordination forced up on to a stage to stand shivering, like a naked orphan, under the spotlight. Whenever we kick a ball, it seems to be magnetically attracted to the railroad tracks on the other side of the fence. Whenever a ball is kicked towards us, it zips unerringly towards our balls.

A few choice highlights from my sporting showreel aptly illustrate my personal relationship with sport (as told by the narrator from The Wonder Years):

Memory One: Age – six (?). Chris participates in a football game against a rival primary school called Squirrels (that’s how Chris remembers it, although that seems like a retarded name for a primary school thinking about it now). He is playing in defence (typical). He watches the team’s goalkeeper impossibly knee himself in the face whilst trying to do a goal kick. The goalie is concussed, and Chris is sent off for a time out because he can’t stop laughing, even after being forcefully shaken by the referee. The team proceeds to lose the game about forty-nil, possibly because they never think to replace the goalie. That was their only game of the season.

Memory Two: Age – 11. Chris tells his dad he’s quitting rugby to join “hobby club”. He watches the glint of paternal love die in his father’s eyes, as if God is whispering in papa’s ear: “Well, this has all gone to shit, hasn’t it?” In this case, Chris imagines God to be a really smug muscle-bound rugby player, like in that episode of Friends. In fact, that is how he will imagine God from now on, because it seems right.

Memory Three: Age – 14. New school, rugby now compulsory. Chris decides that instead of wearing those tiny little rugby shorts that look like they’re made out of Kevlar, he’ll wear his nice comfy tracksuit bottoms. During training he attempts to do what he understands is called a “tackle”. Chris’s intended victim, uncharitably, ignores the fact that his arms are wrapped around his knees and doesn’t even slow down. Momentum causes his nice comfy tracksuit bottoms to slide down to his ankles as he is dragged across the field. Unconfirmed rumours suggest that if you find that same rugby pitch, you can still see the last shred of Chris’s dignity, laid out like a dead puppy on the damp turf.

And that about sums it up. I imagine that any true geek has an equally embarrassing collection of crushing sporting misfires crammed into a musty corner of their sub-conscious. If you’re a geek and you don’t, it just means your humiliation was so exquisitely mortifying that your brain has repressed the memory to prevent uncontrollable, random sobbing in later life. Anyway, don’t kid yourself. Geeks who overcompensate about sports usually end up like this.

So fuck sport, essentially. Give me hobbies, games, pursuits, pastimes, diversions, distractions. Give me arts, crafts and interests as quickly as you can make them up. Just don’t make me line up with a bunch of red-faced goons in an effort to work out which one of us is the best at them. It never ends well. For me, anyway.

Top Five: Events at a geek-friendly Olympic Games
1. Cosplay championship
2. 800m Hurdles – Severe Asthmatics Edition™
3. Warhammer 40,000 tabletop tournament
4. Obscure music/film reference face-off
5. Wotsits Scoffing – an endurance event, brought to you by Wotsits