Hartley Neita, Contributor

I am usually good at planning my time. I had been working on a book, The Search, about some teenagers who were lost in the Blue Mountains some 70 years ago. Having finished it, my attention turned to finalising another book, this one about former Prime Minister Donald Sangster.

Work was progressing on this book quite well, despite the distraction caused by the two young men whose plane crashed into the forest near the Blue Mountain peak. The coincidence led my thoughts to wondering what would have happened to them had this accident occurred before the inventions of cellphones and helicopters.

The real distraction, however, was the Olympics. I have not been able to avoid the world-class exhibitions of judo, fencing, equestrianism, cycling, gymnastics, weightlifting, shooting and archery. It has been mind-boggling. I could not help thinking of my youth while watching archery when we boys made bows from bamboo, and the fun we had. Wondering, too, how the Sheriff of Nottingham would have fared if Robin Hood and his Merry Men had bows and arrows of the power and accuracy of these modern weapons.

Special games

If we had known of the Olympics when we were wearing short pants, with pee-pee holes, we could have created a special programme of games right here in Jamaica.

The Games would have begun with playing with the gig. In this game, it would not be to see who could split our opponent's gig, but whose gig could spin longest before it collapsed to the ground.

Then there would be marbles. This involved placing small marbles in a ring and competitors using a bigger marble to hit them, one by one, out of the ring. Another game would be the board horse. This, of course, would depend on rain when water would flow down the side of the road. The board horses, little pieces of wood, would be placed in this water to race other board horses while the contestants would run beside the stream urging the horses on.

Gold medal winner

Flying kites would be another event. Each kite would have razor blades in its tail to cut the string of the others. The last kite remaining in the sky would be the gold medal winner. Another sport for boys would be throwing the cricket ball, an event which was held in the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports up to the late 1930s.

Naturally, there would be events for girls. The most popular would be skipping. The girls would skip and skip ad infinitum, with the winners increasing the number of their skips each year.

Another game would be the egg and spoon race. The entrants would have to sneak eggs from where the hens laid them under their houses without letting their mothers know. Another event would be the three-legged race, involving two girls each tying their right foot to the other girl's left foot and racing their three-legged competitors.

Jacks would also be an event for girls. So, too, would be rounders. This was a form of baseball involving one girl who was the thrower and the other a batter who closed her fist and used it to bat the ball.

In later years, we would have added skittles, darts, and dominoes. Who to tell? These games could have become a tourist attraction by now.