Allie's Top 5 Most Hated Sports

I've had it with sports. Especially when they require you to be coordinated on your feet or to endure beyond the point of sanity. To demonstrate my disgust, I have decided to make a list of my top 5 Most Hated Sports.

1) Rogaine. To be fair, I haven't actually ever taken part in rogaine, but I have a moral aversion to it. For one thing, as the New Zealand Rogaining Association website will tell you, it was given its name because the three Australian creators of the sport were called Rod, Gail, and Neil. Need I say more? For another, in my seventh form year at school I had a few friends who were obsessed with multisport and outdoor pursuits, and they couldn't shut up about them, and it annoyed me no end. They think rogaine is fun, so automatically I can't help feeling a lot less kindly towards the sport. It also happens to be "the sport of long-distance cross country navigation", like orienteering on a massive scale, lasting for twenty-four hours. "Rogaines are normally on foot and are usually navigated with standard 1:50,000 topomaps." Sounds like the most hellish sport ever devised by man to me.

2) Soccer. Apparently soccer players hate being called soccer players, preferring 'football' which is apparently more professional-sounding. I therefore take pleasure in calling it soccer. It takes second place because I once had to go through about a six month period where every single friend I had at school wanted to go play soccer every lunch time. Ugh. It was horrible. Ever since, I can't help shuddering whenever I think about it. I don't know why I am so bad at soccer and I don't know why I hate it so much - I can't help it. I think I must be a hand-eye sort of person, not a foot-eye, because I just cannot do anything with a soccer ball. I don't even enjoy watching it on TV.

3) Mini golf. I was going to put golf, because that is universally acknowledged to be the most boring game in the world to watch. But then I thought, even though I've never played proper golf, that I can see what the fuss is about when you're actually playing it - wandering around immaculate greens in the sun, wearing white, conversing pleasantly with your friends and sipping lemonade afterwards. But mini golf - for someone like me whose patience brain cell is about the size of a dust mite, mini golf has to be the most infuriating game in the world. There is always at least one hole that, in the end, drives you to scream manically, tear your hair out, and hurl your club at it. There is none of the class and all of the boredom.

4) Touch rugby. Now, rugby itself I can handle. I've never played it properly, but it's fun to run around grasping an oddly-shaped ball and push people over. But in touch rugby, you don't even get to be violent! Where's the fun in that? All people can do is touch you gently on the shoulder or back, so basically the entire game is spent running and running and running, but nothing happens. It's also a summer game, so all this running is done in the blazing heat. Not my idea of fun.

5) Gymnastics. I had a stint when I was six when I imagined the romance of doing ballet or gymnastics. Mum said I could join Brownies or do gymnastics, and so I chose the latter, naturally. Little did I know I had about as much natural skill for gymnastics as a mosquito does for weightlifting. The only thing I could do was walk along the beam, and there was no way I was trusting the brittle-looking trainer to catch me whenever she tried to persuade me to fly through the air. The ultimate humiliation came in the test at the end of term when all my class was put up a grade, including Amanda Poore, my classmate who seemed perfect at the time, and I stayed where I was and got only one sticker on my certificate, for walking on the beam.

Anything else? Well, I know that it's not very fashionable to be anti-sports or anti-physical exercise, so I want to point out that I do enjoy some sports very much - examples: tennis, volleyball, walking, swimming. All this built-up frustration just came to a head, when today I saw a personalised license plate saying "ROGAIN" and felt like hitting the driver over the head with a hub cap. [Obviously, I do not condone violence against rogaine-lovers in any shape or form. I just want to spread the hate.]