Parker Vermilyea might not be walking yet, but that doesn’t mean the 14-month-old can’t hit the gas when he wants to.
And in a larger-than-normal field at the KELA/KMNT Diaper Derby on the Community Stage at the Southwest Washington Fair Thursday, Vermilyea left his competitors in the dust not once but three times, taking first place out of 20 toddlers to win a pile of prizes many times larger than himself.
“He’s good. He loves it,” said his mother and coach, Haley Vermilyea.
Despite the higher numbers forcing organizers to expand the day of racing to six preliminary heats, with winners moving on to three semifinals, followed by one grand final, racing wasn’t always the focus for the competitors. Multiple heats took more than a minute, with one even having to be briefly postponed when all three competitors decided they’d rather get to know each other better in the middle of the 20-foot track than beat each other to the finish line.
Parker, on the other hand, had no such issues. The Toledo Torcher started the day off fast, setting the tone with a time of 13.80 seconds in the first heat of the day.
Coming back for his semifinal, Parker went even faster, crawling a competition-best 8.57 second to guarantee a prize and send himself to the final three. There, he got off to a slow start, falling behind Isaac Holmgren out of Chehalis. A few seconds in, he got moving, roared back ahead, stopped briefly a foot before the final line to stare directly into a phone camera a la Usain Bolt, and crossed the line to his waiting bottle, his mother and his victory.
Haley, who lettered in soccer, basketball, and softball at Adna during her own athletic career, said she found out about the event on Wednesday.
“It was just spur of the moment. I found out about it yesterday, and I was like, ‘We’re gonna do it,’” she said. “He’s still crawling, not walking, so we might as well try to win something.”
With so little time to get ready, there wasn’t much to be done in terms of practice, but that’s not to say the Vermilyeas didn’t prepare. Thursday morning, they kept him in the stroller as much as they could to get him as pent up as possible. Once it came time to race, he went up in the arms of his great-grandmother, with his mom lined up on the other side of the track.
“He’s not a huge fan of my grandma yet, so it was perfect to send him out with someone he wasn’t a fan of,” Haley said.
For winning, Parker won a heap of prizes that included a rocking chair, gift cards, a photo session, a handheld blower, and a whole lot of wipes and diapers, which Haley said could last for a fair bit of time — provided they were big enough.
“He’s a big boy,” she said.
