Spectator competition winners: Chaucer goes to Wimbledon

In Competition No. 3345, you were invited to submit a report on a popular sporting event as it might have been written by someone who is not first and foremost a sportswriter. In a high-class field, David Silverman, the Revd Dr Peter Mullen and Ben Hale were unlucky to lose out on the £25 which goes to the winners below:

It is the usual nightmare. I select a horse of those milling at the start of a steeplechase. I opt for the grey, committing immediately a humiliating crime against the form book Father scrupulously maintained. No steeple materialising from the winter gloom, I grow anxious how the race can be completed before it is commenced. The beasts set out at the wordless behest of a figure on a rostrum. They are guided by the insistent hands and elbows of jockeys, ancient, weatherworn children holding whips in ominous reserve for the closing stages. The race extends over several miles, the prominent performance of the grey horse increasing the certainty of its ultimate failure. A darker horse ridden with presumptive confidence looms always in cool pursuit. Hulking fences winnow the runners and my grey falls, to howls barely recognisable as mine, at the last. I instruct Max Brod: incinerate my betting slips.

Adrian Fry/ Kafka

When that in sommer with his gentil sonne

Folkes make a pilgrimage to Wimbledonne

They gatherre in a mounde lik manye ants

To see yonge ladyes show hir underpantes.

And also menne hir play with furrie balle

And listenne carefulye when judges calle.

Lik fiendes they runne and jumpe with naked thighyes

To rousse a chere or else to winne a prize.

And muche distressed they are if they shoodde het

The litel furrie balle againste the nette.

Bothe yongen too and olden com to watche

What folkes informe me is a tennis match.

Butte tho I tried to seeke for reasons why

The motley crowde hir cam, confused am I.