Give me a C.H.E.E.R

THE CHEERLEADER

EMILY JUPP

My name is Emily Jupp and I am a cheerleader. Well, I was. As my 30th year looms I’m leaving the sport I’ve loved for a decade, not because I’ve finally realised that cheerleading is full of air-headed, pom-pom-wielding harpies, spawned from the collective loins of Jordan, Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls and the Devil out to destroy the confidence of the young and impressionable. No, it’s because I’m not quite good enough. Like a Premier League footballer slightly past his prime, I’ve decided to duck out early.

Some readers less familiar with the UK’s fastest-growing sport — according to the Office for National Statistics — might question my physical prowess, imagining some sort of lumpen creature incapable of summoning the meagre strength required to raise a pom-pom in the air. Well, it’s not like that. I’m finally hanging up my poms because cheerleading in the UK today is hard. Don’t believe me? Try doing a standing back tuck (a flip). I don’t care if you’re on the Tube, go on, give it a go. Now try doing a standing back tuck after two minutes of gymnastics, high-speed dance routines and throwing actual people into the air. Tough, isn’t it? That’s why it’s wonderful that about 37 per cent of schools now do cheerleading as part of the sports curriculum; those kids aren’t just shaking their tooshies, they’re getting super-fit.

Sideline totty — those glorified dancers that most people think of as cheerleaders — are a world away from cheerleading as a form of competitive sport, or even compared with the soft versions of the sport springing up, where the focus is on genuine fitness, not flirting. One example is Cheerobics ®, a hybrid exercise created by cheerleaders. It’s not the hardcore competitive version of the sport I know and love, but it is fun, and if it takes a bit of pom-pom waving to get you off the sofa and into an aerobics class, then where’s the harm?

The uniform is probably the area of cheerleading that’s most heavily maligned. Leering misogynists might argue that if cheerleaders want to be taken seriously, we shouldn’t parade around in those damn sexy skirts but cheerleading uniforms aren’t just pretty, they’re practical. When you’re being thrown into the air you want people to catch you, and the best material to catch hold of isn’t, shockingly, a formal twinset, baggy dungarees or even a lovely, flower-patterned two-man tent with a hole in the top for your head to poke through. It is skin. No one says about an Olympic gymnast: “Look at her and her skimpy leotard. Honestly, she’s an embarrassment to women everywhere.” Yet when those same athletes compete as cheerleaders, that’s what they’re told.

What I love most about cheerleading is that everyone has to work in a team: if one person makes a wrong move, the whole pyramid falls down; if someone’s uniform doesn’t conform, the whole team gets marked down by the judges. Far from being dismissive to women, it’s actually incredibly fair to both genders because it puts them on an equal footing. Men and women can compete together in mixed-sex teams, against other mixed-sex teams. I don’t know any other sport like it. What cheerleading needs is re-branding. We could call ourselves “serious athletes who do very difficult routines involving gymnastics and human-weightlifting” — but that might be hard to cheer along to with any sense of genuine perkiness.

THE POM-POM PASSER

ROSAMUND URWIN

As a feminist of the Germaine Greer-quoting, Hugh Hefner-hating variety, it probably shouldn’t come as much surprise that I am no fan of cheerleading. That it’s spread through Britain’s schools makes me want to stand outside gyms dressed as a suffragette, telling girls that there is another way. While I’ve no time for bra-burning, I’d happily turn pyromaniac over pom-poms.

Yes, I got the memo. It’s relatively athletic. A few boys do it. It bears a resemblance to gymnastics. And, in the age of obesity, we’re supposed to welcome anything that makes teenage girls get sweaty in schools (well, except for sex and stimulants, obviously).

But all sports are not created equal. And cheerleading usually means girls supporting the boys, making women’s exercise a side-dish, the Caesar salad to the main male event of steak and chips.

Take a recent Twenty20 cricket match. During the breaks, three cheerleaders kept popping up and waving their pom-poms. It was cringe-inducing. That was partly because they were terrible, but mostly because they only seemed to have been hired to titillate a boozed-up, predominantly male audience. They were a sexy diversion to prevent the building of beer snakes. Personally, I wanted to ask them to give me a “V”, an “O”, an “M”, an “I” and a “T”. Because I don’t want young girls thinking that the sole contribution they can make at the Oval is to wiggle their bottoms at the crowd: I want them imagining they’ll be batting and bowling themselves there one day.

So at best, cheerleading relegates women to being a rubbish support act: Athlete to blokes’ Oasis. But there’s also the sexualisation element. Do we really want to tell females in their formative years that their best option is to shake their booty in skimpy outfits? MTV is already trying to brainwash them into believing that — we don’t need that message emanating from schools too.