My son had perhaps the best Family Day in Canada.
We have participated in a "dummy downhill" race since 2015. Strap a pair of skis or a snowboard to some form of mannequin or box or whatever, and race them down a controlled slope with jumps and things in the way in heats of 4. Top 2 move on. Keep going until a winner is crowned.
Eleven years ago, my daughter drew a figure of a boy on a plank of wood. My father cut it out. I made a platform and attached it to a pair of old skis. My daughter drew a face on the dummy. We named the dummy "Carter's Catastrophe".
Carter's Catastrophe has competed every year since 2015, save last year due to a scheduling conflict. It has made it to the semi finals on occasion, but has been rather unsuccessful overall.
This year, parents were not allowed to launch the dummies. Dads, nostrils flared, have historically fired dummies down the hill with extreme velocity. Now the kids would have to do it.
No problem, my daughter is 18 and strong.
"Nope, I'm not a kid," says the daughter.
Dammit.
The job falls to the tentative 10-year-old son and his 7-year-old friend. Another quick elimination, I assume.
But we win the first heat. Tied our best result already.
Then we win the second heat. We're in the finals. Zach has the slowest launch, but Carter navigates the traffic and the jumps better than most people could.
The finals are against a family who have two kids on our cross team, as well as two very popular families at the club. We're not social types. We do this race as a bit of a personal tribute to Carter, but the design of the dummy is intentional. I want to win this. We want to win this.
In the final, the emcee counts us down from 10. Two dummies launch at the count of 2. Wonderful. Zach and his teammate launch about a second later. Carter immediately gets tied up with one of the cheaters. Zach's teammate is chasing the other cheater on a snowboard.
Oh well, we made the final. Still, Carter somehow extricates "himself" from the first cheater, but with no remaining momentum, continues listlessly in slow motion pursuit.
At the last jump, the cheating snowboard looks like a slam dunk for victory before it collides with the side snow bank and flips over, stopping well short of the finish.
Zach's teammate's family are ecstatic. They are cheering as their standing skeleton dummy clears the last two jumps upright. Then the most peculiar thing happens. Their dummy seems to be grinding to a halt for no particular reason. It should not be stopping, but it does. It was as if the Hand of God grabbed it by its bony shoulder and said, NOT TODAY."
Carter continued on. Forgotten by the crowd, the dummy's weight distribution takes it safely over the jumps, if slower than before. Carter passes to the right of the snowboard skeleton and the left of the standing skeleton, and with faultless comedic timing, completes the most unlikely comeback in the history of dummy athletics.
We won. Carter won.
Zach is bouncing. The kid who played by the rules, who launched last every round because he refused to cheat, had his amazing moment in the sun.
What a day.
