ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608260072
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
There are times when having four small children can be a burden.
Saturday afternoon - when Jeff Todd had to sprint 35 yards carrying his 6-year-old daughter, Holly, his 3-year-old son, Cameron, and 2-year-old twins Carly and Lacey all in his arms or on his back - was one of them.
"I need some kind of handicap for this sport," Todd said after taking a spill in the grass.
The sport was "piggyback parent," one of seven events in the Family Olympics - a friendly competition that pitted 13 Roanoke-area families against one another.
Christina Wickham got the idea earlier this year from an article she read in Family Fun magazine and decided to organize the games and invite her friends with children from 2 years old to the fifth grade.
The venue, behind the Penn Forest Elementary School, had some of the trappings of the real Olympics. Each family showed up with a homemade banner for the opening ceremony, which consisted of the lighting of the official Olympic torch - a Tiki lamp propped against an outdoor grill.
Some of the sports, such as tug-of-war, the six-lap relay, and watermelon-seed spitting - an event dominated by the dads - needed little explanation. Others required a demonstration from Wickam's brother, Martin Erb, who was considered an impartial judge being that he was from Richmond.
"I will now demonstrate the proper technique, having never done this before," Erb said at the start of one event.
In terms of sheer volume, nothing topped the mom-calling competition. Each mother was blindfolded, then spun around three times by her husband and pointed in the general direction of her children.
The problem was, her kids were mixed in with about 30 others, all of whom needed little prompting to begin yelling "Hey, Mom!" at the top of their lungs. The objective was for mom to find her own children in the screaming, wiggling mass of energy and send them running back to the finish line.
The first family across the line won the Olympic gold. There were also bronze and silver for the other winners, who received their medals as they stood on a picnic table.
Tammy Felker did not place in the mom-calling contest, but some confusion over the rules might have had something to do with that. "Our kid thought she was playing keep away," her husband, Brad Felker, said.
But winning was not the main emphasis of these games, where Diet Coke was the strongest performance-enhancing stimulant to be found. Instead, the games gave the families a chance to get together for some fun and a picnic dinner before summer fades into the back-to-school rush.
"It's a nice, healthy way to spend a Saturday afternoon," Todd said.
Wickam said her children were particularly excited about the Olympics theme, having watched the Atlanta games on television. For the past few weeks, she said, they trained by playing their own Olympics.
"My kids were running around the house, and they had me time them to see if they were as fast as Michael Johnson," she said. "They weren't."
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY Staff. The Felker family, (from front) Clara,by CNBBeth, Lara, Tammy and Brad, compete Saturday in the Family Olympics
in Roanoke. color.