I find the theatrics of men’s footy and ‘time-wasting’ simultaneously irritating and comical. It’s not surprising that in the less popular and historically less lucrative Women’s footy, the players spend less time pretending to be hurt.

The performance of ‘being fouled’ reminds me of the need to perform disability in certain situations. This is something that we shouldn’t have to do but are sometimes forced into so that we are considered worthy of the care we need. Of course the circumstances and reasons are wildly different to the multimillion pound ‘beautiful game’ but the ridiculousness isn’t so far apart.

In a system that is constantly trying to catch you out and take away the very limited and basic support and care you’re entitled to, sometimes you have to show them what it’s like on your worst day. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is known for spying on disabled people and wrongly accusing them of fraud, taking them to court, siezing their property, rejecting appeals for support in their unfair ‘Fit to Work’ assessments and causing thousands of deaths of sick and disabled people every year. Sick and disabled people live in fear of being not disabled enough or the wrong kind of disabled. Either too scared to apply for any support in the first place or living in fear of having their support taken away.

I wonder, what do we have to do to be believed? Should I throw myself on the ground and weep in front of you, my face in my hands, grasping at every part of me that hurts? It’s foul!

Did you know that when you look up synonyms for the word ‘athletic’ it suggests; ‘frail, weak, infirm, delicate’.

Antonyms include, ‘muscly, well built, strong, fit, healthy’ and… ‘able-bodied’..

As if to suggest that disabled people could not also be athletic or hyperable at the same time, that they are mutually exclusive. Of course we know this not to be true but we rarely see examples of this in mainstream media, unless it is for inspiration porn.

This is why I have chosen to use the term, ‘hyperable’ instead of the word ‘athletic’. Too often this body type is considered the norm, the average or what is considered ‘healthy’ in our Western society and media. Everyone else’s experiences of their body, who don’t fit into this category, are somehow deemed less than. I want to highlight, through the language and terminology that I use, that all body types are of course valid and that being athletic or hyperable is a choice to push your body into a form that is in most cases, beyond what is necessary to survive. You have made yourself, in some way, ‘hyper-able.’

Bodies are more complicated than the binaries of athletic or weak, fast or slow, healthy or unhealthy. They are soft and leaky, strong and vulnerable, uncooperative and reliably inconsistent. They contain emotions and memories. We can adorn them with the symbols of who we are and connect with ourselves and others through them. Where are the celebratory arena sized events for these bodies? The non-normative normal bodies.  

Besides, the word athlete comes from ancient Greek words that mean, ‘one who competes for a prize’ so in some sense we can all be athletes if we really want to be. I won a goldfish on the fair once.

Ray Jones, born 1950 on a council estate in Derby, a saxophonist, a freemason, an enthusiast of obscure experimental films and a collector of strange art prints, a Body Builder, a statue frozen in time, a mystery.

My deceased Dad, who died of a heart attack when I was almost 3 years old, is where I think I can mark my first awareness of hyperable bodies. They’d lift weights together my Mum told me, they’d run up and down the flights of stairs in their highrise apartment building my Mum told me. I still have a couple of his gym tops she gave me.