My human mum, Jane and my human sister, Emma both
love watching the Olympics, which is something that happens every four years,
and the humans from different countries all over the world go to one place in
the world and do games against each other to see which of them can do the game
the best, and the one who is best gets a gold medal, and the one after that
gets a silver medal, and then the one after that a bronze medal, but anyone who
comes after that gets nothing, but hopefully has had fun doing the game anyway,
and they all are proud to do the game for their country.
In a legend – which means a story from some time
ago that may or may not be true – a man called Heracles – who had a dad who was
a god (not a dog) called Zeus, and a mum who was a human called Alcmene,
started the games in Ancient Greece, which was still the country Greece, but
when it was in ancient times, which means a very long time ago. Emma says she
thought it first happened, when someone had to run from one place to another
that was a marathon run away – which means a bit over 42,000 metres – to give
someone else a message, which then may have been on a scroll or maybe even a
piece of stone if it was very long ago – and that’s why humans now do marathon
runs and that was the first game, when it wasn’t a game, but was important, cos
something serious had to be told to someone. But that may be true, though it’s
not a legend, cos as far as I know, Emma is the only one who has said it, and
she didn’t start saying it a very long time ago, which would make it a legend. Emma
might be getting her stories mixed up cos she is a human and all humans have
muddled thinking and there is a true story that says a human cook, called Coroebus,
did a ‘footrace’, which means a race on his feet, which may mean a race that’s
fast cos you are running, or slower cos you are walking, but has been reported
by humans who may have forgotten to say what it means in ancient times, who may
or may not have been ancient in age humans, but he did 192 metres and was the
first and only person to win a game at the Olympics in 776BC, which is the
first time humans wrote down what happened, and when there was only one game.
It was called the Olympics cos it happened in a place called Olympia. And since
that time humans have made a lot of different games to try against each other
to see who is the best at each of them. I wonder if Coroebus had to do the footrace
cos he had made someone some dinner and that person was waiting for it, so he
ran to give it to them, and that’s when the humans thought that has to be the first
game we play. A game that involves giving someone their dinner sounds a lot of
fun.
I made up games to play with my humans, and I taught
them how to do them. We all had a lot of fun playing them. The humans had to do
one thing and I did another thing, and it only worked if they did their thing
right – I always did my thing right for me, but may have changed it to make
them think more about it, which may have got them even more into muddled thinking.
One of the games, I went out of one door, ran around, and barked at another
door to be let in. That made my humans laugh once they worked out where I had
gone, and so I laughed too, cos it’s a lot of fun laughing together. In another
game, they put up a gate at the bottom of the stairs, making a high jump, that
was much too high for me to jump over, but I made up the game in a different
way, and waited til one of them was going up the stairs and ran past them to
get to the top first, and arrive in Jane’s room with my tail wagging a lot, and
usually Emma running up after me, cos I played it with her most, and then all
three of us would laugh at what had happened. The prize for that game was a Babybel
Cheese given to me by Jane, and I always won it. Sometimes I then had a rest on
Jane’s bed, but other times Emma would carry me back down again, and then I
waited til it was time to play the game again. One time it went wrong, cos Emma
forgot about the game, and I was overexcited and Jane wasn’t upstairs in her
room with my Babybel. It started as it usually did with Emma heading to the
gate, and me following, and then I did my thing to run past her, and she missed
the first stair and tripped over me and dislocated and broke her ankle. Nobody
laughed, and I felt very sad, so when Emma got back from having her ankle
fixed, I lay on it to heal it, and we both felt very good again. As Emma has
just said, sometimes things go wrong, and it’s nobody’s fault, and then those
playing the games get hurt, and that often happens in the Olympic games too.
When Emma couldn’t play, I’d play with other humans. I used to do it too when I
was a cat. One of my games then was to get my human dad Peter to give me food.
It was quite a challenging game for me, as he just wanted to get his coffee.
Really, I was supposed to wait for Emma to come to give me food, but I liked
the challenge of getting Peter to do it, so I’d lift my front paws up to the
top of his pyjamas and pull them down! He then fed me very fast! I also learned
to open Emma’s bedroom door, to wake her up, so she could give me a strokes or
food or play games.
I think food is the best reward rather than a metal
medal, but when I told Emma I was thinking of entering the Dogolympics cos I
know Jane and Emma would enjoy watching me, and it’s the same as the human one,
but dogs play it instead, she said ‘Are you going for gold, Ted?’, I said, ‘No,
I’m going for a Babybel’, and she said, ‘Well, what colour is a Babybel, Ted,
on the inside’, and I grinned cos I understood what she meant, and so I decided
to go for a Golden Babybel.
The Dogolympics happens when it isn’t so hot in the
place that everydog has to go to play the games in. That is because we are all
wearing fur coats, so it would be very difficult for us to play a lot with all
our energy so that we could win, which would be too dangerous for us with a lot
of heat too. The games we play are mostly the same as human ones, so not the
dog games played at dog shows. But, like the paralympics where humans who have
parts of their bodies missing or not working as well as for someone who is
fully able, there are adaptations – which just means equipment we need to use
is changed so we can do the game with it. Next thing was to choose which game
to do. As I was thinking about it, I watched Emma and Jane watching the
Olympics on TV. The game started with humans jumping into the river and
swimming. There was a lot of water splashing around, and I could see Jane’s
lips moving around and she looked as though she was trying to stop them. The
same thing was happening to Emma, then as soon as the first person tried
running out of the water to their bicycle, she couldn’t stop herself, and she
started laughing, and then so did Jane, and then so did I, and then I thought
that’s the game I have to play, cos laughing is the most important part of
playing a game, unless you win, when the Babybel Cheese is the most important
part. The last thing the people playing had to do was run, and I’m very good at
that. So, I did a lot of practising and became a Tridoglete, which means a dog
who does swimming, then cycling, then running. The swimming bit is fine, and so
is the running, but the adaptation for me was a tricycle, instead of a bicycle,
so my cycle has three wheels instead of two. The part of it that humans would
hold with their hands is low so my front paws can reach, and the things that
move the wheels around, also near the ground so my back paws can reach. This
year the Olympics, Paralympics and Dogolympics are all in Paris. We dogletes had
to wait til it was cooler and both tridogletes and triathletes had to wait til there
weren’t lots of things in the river that would make us unwell if we swallowed
them, which can happen when you’re splashing around, especially if you are
doing doggy paddle which makes water splash around even more.
When I did my tridogleting, my thinking was going
all round about making sure I don’t drink too much of the water, but paddle
fast through it, do my shaking off the water quick as I get onto my bike, and
get my helmet on so if I fall off I don’t hurt my head, then make sure I run so
fast I fly along, and all that time my humans laughing as they watch, and other
humans clapping and cheering ‘Let’s go, Teddy, Let’s go!’ and being given a
gold medal at the end that would be a Babybel Cheese. I was just thinking about
that all along and not looking at other tridogletes. Emma was there as my
trainer, and I was thinking about Jane’s lips trembling watching me on TV as I did
the swimming, and laughing as I did the shaking, and the biking, and then me
bounding along my legs going as fast as I could make them, and I closed my eyes
and imagined my human mum’s biggest smile and my tail wagging ‘nineteen to the
dozen’ as she would say, and as I crossed the line, I opened my eyes and there
was Mummy Jane, laughing and presenting me with my Golden Babybel Cheese! And
then I saw all the other tridogletes were behind me and I had got there first,
and so I got to stand on the highest podium and get given another Gold Medal
with a Babybel inside it by one of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s Corgis. And
my humans kept smiling and laughing and saying it was very funny how my ‘little
legs went like mad’, and I was so happy I had made them so happy, and they’d
watched me right there in person and dog!
Love and licks, Ted XOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
To read more stories like this one please visit my
blog http://tedterrier.blogspot.co.uk/ or you can get my book The Journal of Ted Terrier
from any amazon website: http://tinyurl.com/q6a49tx at .com or http://tinyurl.com/o3pjra8 at .co.uk. I am also at www.wooftasticbooks.com
The Blog of Ted Terrier © 2024 by Emma Knight
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