WATCHING sprinter Usain Bolt at Beijing brought back so many memories of my own athletic achivements.

Sadly, these were not terribly happy memories, especially when it came to school Sports Day.

The smell of newly-mown grass, the crack of the starter's pistol, the agony of watching the backs of other boys disappear into the distance.

It all came painfully flooding back last week as the fastest man on the planet lit up an already star-spangled Olympics.

While no slouch in the sporting achievement stakes at school, I was, however, a feckless buffoon when it came to any event which did not require a foot to connect with a round ball.

In the same way that we wrongly assume that professional footballers should be able to string complex sentences together to produce cogent and lucid conversations in front of the camera, so my teachers wrongly assumed that because I could kick a football, I was an athlete.

Indeed, some of them even presumed that I could run a mile without the support of a fully-staffed intensive care unit or an oxygen tent.

Over the course of six annual sports days at the school, I managed to: l Throw the javelin three metres - backwards.

l Bend the bar on the high jump so badly that the event had to be cancelled.

l Drop the baton in the sprint relay... twice.

l Have myself disqualified from the hop, skip and jump for managing to get the three disciplines mixed up (although I did create a new school skip, jump and hop record which is yet to be beaten).

But my greatest moment of sports day incompetence came in the 100 yards sprint, the blue riband event of the day.

In the lane outside me was the favourite, a ginger-haired whippet who was so fast that he could have won the race with his underpants round his ankles and a St Bernard dog strapped across his shoulders.

When the gun went off, seven of the runners sprinted forward in a straight line.

Unfortunately, I mistook the white lines curving around the track as the correct course.

The moment of impact - me versus Ginger - was as inevitable as it was spectacular.

When he regained consciousness a few minutes later, he suddenly realised that his moment of guaranteed glory was gone forever.

So he punched me. Hard.

There followed an unseemly scramble of arms, legs and elbow patches as the teachers tried to separate us.

Needless to say, I refrained from taking part in the parents' sprint race at the end of my daughters' sports days for fear of causing a pile-up.

But at least it was comforting to note that my daughter, who stormed to victory in many of her individual races, had not inherited her father's ineptitude.