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SI5
Mr Prime Minister and members of the
cabinet, welcome to this top-secret briefing about our work in
Department SI5.
As you know, SI5, the covert operations
wing of the Ministry of Sport, was formed in the early 1960s. It
was becoming clear that Britain was failing to achieve
international success in sport - even in the many sports that the
British had invented. The brief of SI5 was to develop new
competitive sports and to secretly train British individuals and
teams in them. The new sports would then be internationally
launched, and British success would be assured for the period
until those damned foreigners had read the rules, trained their
own participants and begun to defeat us again.
The Sports Research and Development
Establishments at Porton Down and Aldermaston still remain
closely guarded secrets. The cover story that they are weapons
research facilities has succeeded in masking their real function.
As you know, they were modelled on America’s Area 51 where
the United Stated developed the sports of baseball and American
football to be so complex and obscure that only American teams
could dominate them. The propaganda that Area 51 was a military
research facility developing technologies derived from recovered
alien spacecraft was a masterstroke of public relations which has
also kept secret, to this day, the true purpose of the site.
SI5, as you are aware, has had a number of
notable successes. The invention of soccer and its launch in 1965
led to World Cup victory. Much more recently, the introduction of
curling in the autumn of 2001 led directly to our gold medal at
the 2002 Winter Olympics. This success was, however, tinged with
some disappointment. Sliding a kettle along ice whilst
frantically sweeping ahead of it with brooms was undoubtedly one
of the silliest ideas we have ever developed. It also turned out
to be one of the most tedious. Fifteen million people throughout
the British Isles felt obliged to remain tuned to the Olympic
final. Fourteen and a half million, however, fell asleep before
the end and very many others simply lost the will to live.
The need to constantly develop new winning
sports for Britain led us to examine activities for which the
British are naturally inclined. The advent of competitive
queuing, however, did not fulfil its promise. Being an endurance
sport, the Japanese quickly gained dominance and, indeed, last
year’s world championship continues as the sole remaining
competitor, Jamaswi Harakosho, extends his world record wait
beyond twelve months. The remaining British Rail commuters
reverted to their cars many months ago.
Competitive obesity had also appeared
promising until the Americans became aware of this and generated
contenders on a scale we could not hope to emulate.
We are currently developing the ‘New
Modern Triathlon’ which consists of pigeon racing followed
by train spotting followed by morris dancing. This is now well
into its training phase, and we are confident that it will be a
world beater by the time of the next Olympics.
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