De ars athletica

For those caught up in the excitement of sporting competitions and shows, let’s say that, while we shouldn’t sulk our pleasure, we’re entitled to take a step back from all festivities, and, indeed, doesn’t every human being have a philosophical duty?

To those who push the efficiency of some of their physical capacities, we’ll ask what motivates them to do so, and if some appear quite legitimate, others, such as “hyper-performance” or pure competition, seem pathological, even if it’s society that’s sick. 

Sport is catch-all term, in which it’s interesting to distinguish between play (for children), spectacle (for entertainment), performance (for Belerephons¹ of modern times); competition, which is part of an artificially elitist vision of the world (as opposed to the more efficient functioning of cooperation), and according to which all are condemned to lose (except one, and only temporarily), as well as being part of the nationalism of nations; and finally, the only truly fundamental part, physical exercise, which is necessary for good health.

From this panorama, we see the emergence of amalgams and their consequences, such as the idea of sport as good for health, sport confused with physical exercise, while the long list of sports-related illnesses (osteoarthritis, tendinopathy, sprains or ruptured tendons, dislocations, pubalgia…) demonstrates the opposite, or the thousands of losers, inevitably, faced with a single, ephemeral winner, making the goal inaccessible to almost all competitors.

To sort things out, let’s take each of these notions one by one.

Children’s play.

Thanks to the work of Maria Montessori (1870-1952), Jean Piaget (1886-1980) and Françoise Dolto (1908-1988), we know how necessary play is for the development of children, and perhaps less so for adults, even if the qualities of perseverance (athletics) or cooperation (team games or “sports”) can always be trained or improved in adults.

Pedagogy has not always emphasized play. In Plato, the key idea was to give all children a chance by taking them out of their unequal family environment. Having given rise to the European Erasmus program, we should mention Erasmus with his De pueris (1529), in which he intends to apply his famous “Men are not born men, they become men”, from early childhood: “from his tenderest years, devote your main effort to him”, he takes from Virgil, but who said this for horses! This omnipotence of education has its limits, which play, now recognized as the key, will compensate for². These games are those that offer correction without adult intervention, as in Montessori pedagogy, or what are now known as Serious games, educational simulation games in the context of the digital revolution that allow the right to make mistakes.

If we’re now talking about adults, we can assume that gaming has taken on a delirious role, in particular electronic games, on computers and then on telephones, the delirium residing in the large number of hours spent playing, an ideal number for a young child, but implausible for an adult.

Of course, many physical activities are playful (ball games are just one of many examples). Here, we’d say that the memory of childish games facilitates the necessary physical exercise; there’s no reason to complain.

The spectacle of entertainment

It seems that we can, without going overboard, denounce the flight into entertainment, as Pascal describes it: human beings

have a secret instinct which leads them to seek entertainment and occupation outside, which comes from resentment of their continual miseries.[…] Thus man is so unhappy [that] the least thing like a billiard table and a ball that he pushes are enough to entertain him.³

As Pascal points out, it’s not amusement alone that’s sought after: “He must form a subject of passion and excite on it his desire, his anger, his fear for the object he has formed, like children who are frightened by the face they have smeared”. This is what sporting events in particular illustrate: a massed crowd entirely fixated on the suspense of a competition, bursting into chorus at the victory of one of them or one team over the others.

Of course, sporting competitions are not the only spectacles that arouse the passion of the crowds: there are films and singers too. It’s their association with ephemeral victories, most often measured to the hundredth of a second for races (running, skiing, swimming…), that is surprising. Of course, each new competition, game or championship is an opportunity to renew the entertainment.

At a time when part of the population is sleeping rough (despite the ephemeral existence of housing ministers), when societal supports – medicine, schools, universities – are crumbling, when average incomes have collapsed almost to the level of minimum incomes⁴, should we not, beyond the psychological aspect highlighted by Pascal, question this panem et circenses⁵, according to which, moreover, games increase as bread is reduced? Doesn’t increasing entertainment go hand in hand with a move away from the ballot box and other civic responsibilities? Of course, no one is orchestrating these phenomena – there’s no deliberate plot – and the scales are adjusting as if by themselves.

There’s one more thing to say about any show, and that’s that it’s all about business. For good reason or bad, crowds need to be moved around, and it’s they who finance their entertainment through expensive facilities and the extravagant incomes of certain players⁶. We can only say that it’s a societal choice, but that its development is in the hands of businessmen, and that politicians seems to see it in a positive light.

Performance, the hallmark of modern-day Belerephons

Of course, swimming well, jumping well and running well follow the irrefutable adage of our grandparents: what’s worth doing, is worth doing well! Performance raises another question: that of the limit, knowing that we quickly tip over into the pathology that has been dubbed “hyperperformance”⁷. To see further, one takes a telescope, smaller a microscope, but to pedal faster, the temptation will have been great to take dopants⁸ It’s even very easy to find doping agents adapted to each sport⁹ (these are not the same for weightlifting as for throwing), with a demand for athletes’ performance that has created a market estimated at 30 billion euros¹⁰, having peaked in the 1990s, marked by major pharmacological advances¹¹.

However, in recent years, there has been a decline in use¹², probably not because it is unethical or creates a health risk.

This risk stems from the essential role of doping: to mask the natural signs of fatigue which would lead the athlete to reduce or stop his or her effort((Amphetamines and ephedrines, whose use is too dangerous for the cardiovascular system and the psyche, are the first drugs to be screened for. Even occasional use could lead to haemorrhaging, or even a sudden left ventricular stroke with acute lung oedema, or a hyperthermic coma leading to death. What’s more, prolonged use can trigger paranoid psychosis¹³.

Beyond the price to be paid for performance, the question remains: what for? Is this not a Bellerophonian desire¹⁴. For if, as Pascal put it, “man infinitely passes man”, or if man is invited to become God (Christianity), it is not through his forever limited body, which not even the most insane transhumanism envisages. That would be a lost cause.

Here, we discover that this aspect of sport – performance – is confused with the simple physical exercise necessary for good health. But there may be another motivation: competition.

Competition, the hallmark of an elitist worldview

Sporting performance, in the sense of marginally pushing back one’s limits, even without resorting too much to over-medicalization (we’re not talking about doping here) or over-training, still seems a little childish to us, but, as a child developing his abilities, rather healthy and natural.

However, it seems that an inseparable driving force is at work: comparative performance! i.e. the invention of competition. Like the little boy who wants to be the biggest – or, at the very least, to pee further than the other – putting his performance in competition with others strikes us as implausibly childish, and for several reasons.

Before discussing these reasons, let’s point out that since girls have been “allowed” to take part in sport – from the Greek thinkers (except Aristotle) up to and including Coubertin – there has been no question of them doing so¹⁵. – this argument of the little boy either falls down, as girls don’t have penises to compare with, or phallocracy has won out, this machismo of the strongest (mafia) or the best rhetorician (politics). If this elitism is indeed a component of machismo, it will have conquered all minds and, in so doing, helped to reduce gender discrimination, which, as far as sport is concerned, will have lasted some 2800 years¹⁶. Of course, it can no longer be said that women have adopted a masculine attitude; it has to be said that elitism, which forms the basis of contemporary socio-political ideology, has become part of societal organization and mores, creating competition rather than a spirit of cooperation and collaboration.

This calls for another comment, of a political nature. The West, which is so fond of the word “democracy”, forgets to point out that, from the American and French origins of today’s republics, this word was opposed to “electoral system”, and it was this latter system that won out over democracy: power-sharing, which should be renamed “diacracy”¹⁷. Elitism is thus a substitute for aristocracy, meaning that power (krateîn = to command) is given to the best (aristos = the best), which seems to be the best idea, depending of course on the criteria used to designate the best!¹⁸.

The fact remains that the way society functions is based on this elitist model, and that it is not without influence on citizens’ unthinking. This socio-political environment, which favors competitions, and the explosion of show competitions that we believe stem from them (song, sewing, pastry-making, cooking, weddings, guest houses, real estate sales)¹⁹, constitutes a unique option, whereas there are others, such as appreciating talents without having to rate them, or the well-known systems of cooperation, which are more effective than systems of competition.²⁰

Let’s come back to the reasons why pitting sporting performance against one another seems puerile. There are five main reasons:

To be sure of losing.

If the aim is to be the best in the world in a given discipline, we start with the certainty that all but one of our followers will lose. This means that most of the participants are competing with an almost absolute probability of defeat. This paradox can only be resolved by saying that the most important thing is not to win, but to compete. This is what a clever person formulated before us(“The important thing is not so much to win as to take part”, as the Bishop of Pennsylvania originally said at the 1908 London Olympic Games. This distorted phrase was later imperturbably attributed to Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin (1863-1937); cf. Jean Durry and Alain Lunzenfichter, in “Olympisme”, Encyclopædia Universalis.)), but what does it mean to compete if you know you’re going to lose (except, of course, a handful of athletes)? There’s only one answer: play, distract yourself, keep busy… or simply fight for the sake of fighting, for the beauty of the pointless gesture. In either case, it all seems quite childish.

To be sure of winning.

If it’s a question of being the “best” only in one’s village, for a given activity, almost anyone can claim it, given that physical characteristics and distinctive talents are widely distributed. So, if I happen to be the fastest runner in the village, is this due to anything other than chance (or providence)? did we really compete? are we really “the best”? Such a feeling would be typically childish.

Leave it to chance.

On the one hand, there are undeniably physical predispositions at birth. These are obvious in basketball, swimming and other sports. To this we can add training discipline, which is also partly linked to birth predispositions. Added to these predispositions are fortunate or unfortunate coincidences: the training itself, linked to meeting the “right” trainer, or not. The medical environment and, whatever the preparation, the form on the day of the competition, which cannot be entirely controlled. On this “hazardous” basis, what is the significance of the comparative performance of competitors who are sometimes separated by a hundredth of a second? There are undeniable champions, but isn’t victory for others often due to the chance of the day? It would be childish, in such a context, to boast of a deserved victory²¹.

Consolation.

It seems to us that it is this statistical impossibility of winning, which has led not only to the claim that “the important thing is to take part”, but, in addition, to the addition of consolation prizes, as in small classes. Of course, this is not to devalue the silver and bronze medals (and certainly not the athletes who have earned them), even if some beneficiary cries with disappointment when he gets it, but to note that this makes it possible to triple the number of winners, which, in the context mentioned, is very significant.

Let’s not forget all the weight ranges in boxing and other combat sports, where the number of winners can be multiplied by ten. This is of course logical and legitimate, but it’s a far cry from the original Greek Games.

Last but not least, the multiplication of events and championships (regional, national, international) has given more competitors the chance to win a few.²².

It can be seen as a puerile consolation for the hundreds of millions of sportsmen and women who compete with all their might in disciplines where the title of world or Olympic champion is forever denied them.

Ephemeral glory.

There are many great champions whose victories stand the test of time. Names like Michel Jazy (1936-2024), Mohamed Ali (1942-2016), Eddy Merckx (1945) and Björn Borg (1956) are familiar even to younger generations. More recently, there’s Teddy Riner (1989), a paragon of the greatest athletes who are often the most modest: “We’re still human beings; we’re just like everyone else”, he says ²³ and who practice generosity often with great discretion (Mayweather, Ronaldo, among many others).

For most competitors, the “glory” is fleeting, as records are regularly broken and one competition follows another. What has been achieved once by a single victorious champion is by no means insignificant, but is there more to it than meets the eye?

And where do you get to with a gold medal at the Olympic Games, which is certainly not something to disparage? This text by another great Judoka seems to speak volumes about what can make competitions seem childish, at the very least, hopeless:

When I heard the Marseillaise, I cried, because I realized that I had reached the end. To the end of everything. I’m like the explorers who thought the earth was flat. They never went to the end to check. But I did. At the end, there’s nothing. It’s the emptiness […] the sleepless night where I stare in despair at this gaping hole that has opened up before me((David Douillet, L’Équipe, September 23, 2000, extract quoted by Isabelle Queval in “Le dépassement de soi, figure du sport contemporain”, Le Débat, n°114, March-April 2001; quoted by Nicole Aubert, “Hyperformance et combustion de soi”, Études, Oct. 2006.

Competition, the hallmark of nationalism

One thing that should surprise us about international competitions, world championships and, fundamentally, the modern Olympic Games, is the exacerbation of nationalism, both by the intrinsic organization of these Games by national teams, and by the roaring crowds, most often grouped by nationality. We’ve strayed far from the original project, which was to foster cultural interaction between countries and promote educational and universal values²⁴; witness the two world wars, not the least of which were curbed by the resurrection of the Olympic Games in 1896. Some see a third on the horizon, but the exacerbated nationalism of the Games cannot be said to be the cause to any degree. In France, it merely reflects the nationalism that the otherwise unpatriotic population embraces as an additional opportunity for national festivities, complementary to those of July 14th or New Year’s Eve. From an early age, spectators arrive with flags and sing national anthems.

Medals are thus counted by nation, whatever its size in terms of population. It’s only recently that a medal rate per 100,000 inhabitants, divided by the reference population, has been able to present a more intelligible picture of a comparable level of “sportsmanship” between countries.

Another “betrayal” was the transition from amateur exclusivity to the integration of professional athletes (1981).

Physical exercise for good health

While (competitive) sport is generally not good for your health, physical exercise is. Recommended as far back as Antiquity (by Aristotle, in particular), it was also recommended by Rabelais (Gargantua, 1534). In today’s French education system, personal motor development is an integral part from CP (pre-school) to Terminale (final year), and an International Charter on Physical Education, Physical Activity and Sport was adopted by member states (UNESCO) in 2015.

France uses the public’s enthusiasm for sports events and the fun aspect of certain sports to promote physical exercise under the name of “sport”: sports games, local sports shows bringing together a few enthusiasts and a large number of spectators. As the Paris2024 Olympic Games draw to a close, September sees the start of the new school year, with the 15^th national edition of “Sentez-Vous Sport” (Feel Sport !), organized by the CNOSF (Comité National Olympique et Sportif Français), as well as the #BEACTIVE European Sports Week. We don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that the combination of sport and physical activity will produce the desired results in terms of public health.

Conclusion

The world being what it is (fairly desacralized)²⁵, and societies what they are (clearly infantilized), it seems unlikely that it will ever be possible to change things as a whole, and in particular to open the catch-all sport and put its components in their place, as we have attempted to do here. Yet, the most clumsy initiatives to encourage women and men to exercise their bodies remain laudable, even if they turn out to have no impact on public health.

At the most general level, it’s worth supporting the paradox of “taking care of our poor brother the body” (S. François d’Assise)²⁶ even though we know that “it is the spirit that makes us live [and that] the flesh is capable of nothing”! (Jn VI, 63).

As always, wisdom rises above paradoxes, and if the “being-towards-death” (“Sein zum Tode”, a major concept in Being and Time (§ 46-60) by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)), which we are sometimes, needs to distract himself from this inescapable end – even with the help of sporting spectacles – should he really be prevented from doing so?

If we consider the three great spiritual paths available to mankind: the paths of action, love and knowledge, which meet at their summit²⁷ – every man being virtually a hero, a saint and/or a sage – isn’t the sporting champion a worthy representative of the hero in the first place? This path of action in fact has a negative aspect: “ purity ‘, to which the athlete’s training (and theforgetting or ’overcoming” of bodily constraints) will be linked, and a positive aspect: “ invincibility ”, to which the competitive trials will be linked. On a spiritual level, the former corresponds to the fear of God and detachment from the world, the latter to the fight against the passions and, in the face of evil, the victorious power of God.

So, in a desacralized world and infantilized societies, doesn’t the champion model – be it theoretical or virtual – which includes virtuous notions such as discipline, courage and effort, give the image of a lost path? The frenzied enthusiasm of the public is not misleading, as it recognizes one of the great paths of humanity. With the limits of the body, the performances to be expected and the vagaries of competitions, it sees that this model can easily be transposed from the corporeal to the spiritual. Yet, it’s up to each individual to transpose it into his or her spiritual life. There is no championship of holiness, but these other kinds of champions achieve it, and holiness remains the goal of every Christian.

Note: For a humorous and iconoclastic version of these thoughts, see Vive le sport! une histoire sur 100 000 ans, published by Risibilis éditions, distributed by L’Harmattan (€12) – in French.

Footnotes

1. Belerephon, the grandson of Sisyphus, emerges victorious from various trials and, out of pride, attempts to fly to Mount Olympus on Pegasus to match the gods. He will be well punished by Zeus![↩]
2. “Human freedom runs great risks when the thesis of the omnipotence of education is accepted”, Maurice Debesse, “Les idées d’Érasme sur l’éducation”, Bulletin de psychologie, t. 20, n°258, 1967, p. 972.[↩]
3. Blaise Pascal, Éditions de Port-Royal : Chap. XXVI – Misère de l’homme : 1669 et janv. 1670 p. 203-217 / 1678 nos. 1-3 p. 198-211. Let’s add: “Such a man spends his life without boredom by playing little every day. Give him every morning the money he can earn every day, on condition that he does not gamble, and you make him unhappy. You might say that he’s looking for the fun of the game, not the gain. So make him play for nothing; he won’t warm up to it and he’ll get bored. So it’s not just the fun he’s looking for; languid, passionless fun will bore him; he needs to warm up to it and blow his own trumpet, imagining that he’d be happy to win what he wouldn’t want to be given on condition that he didn’t play, so that he forms a subject of passion and excites on it his desire, his anger, his fear for the object he has formed, like children who are frightened by the face they have smeared (ibid.).[↩]
4. Not so long ago, the average salary of a teacher was four and a half times the minimum wage; now it’s down to one and a half times.[↩]
5. The famous “bread and games” controlling the masses of Juvenal (Satires, X), this Roman poet of the late I^er and early II^e century.[↩]
6. If the criterion is the money made from these contests, the 1997 Gold-Silver-Bronze podium gave basketball (Michael Jordan, $114m), golf (Tiger Wood, §46m) and cars (Michael Schumacher, $41m), that of 2014 boxing (Flyod Mayweather, $105m), soccer (Cristiano Ronaldo, $80m) and basketball (James Lebron, $72m) ; to be updated for 2024![↩]
7. Nicole Aubert, “Hyperformance et combustion de soi”, Études, Oct. 2006.[↩]
8. From 1968 to 2017, almost 100% of Tour de France winners have been pinned for doping at one time or another, none since! Cf. cyclisme-dopage.com.[↩]
9. There are sympathomimetic amines with psychostimulant action, strychnine-based stimulant alkaloids and other tonicardiacs and vascular stimulants…[↩]
10. https://info.arte.tv/en/le-dopage-en-quelques-chiffres.[↩]
11. With the arrival of new molecules, the global economic chain was reorganized: producing countries (Russia, Ukraine), processing laboratories (Netherlands, Spain), storage countries (Belgium, Switzerland), consumers (Europe, North America).[↩]
12. In the Tour de France, from 106 out of 197 participants pinned in 1997, only 4 out of 176 were pinned in 2024.[↩]
13. Xavier Deleu and Yonathan Kellerman, “Sport : le revers de la médaille” (Arte, 2014), LCP/Public Sénat, 03/07/16.[↩]
14. see note 1.[↩]
15. note that at the second Olympic Games (Paris, 1900), 22 women were allowed to take part. Parity was achieved in Paris 2024.[↩]
16. The first historical Olympic Games date back to 776 BC, on the initiative of Iphitos, King of Elis.[↩]
17. see La démocratie du future. Le partage du pouvoir, L’Harmattan, 2022 or the paper “From Democracy to Diacracy”.[↩]
18. in particular, the selective priority given to intellectual abilities at the expense of intelligence places the same type of technocratic individual in all political and economic positions.[↩]
19. including classical music, where a winner has to be decided between opera singers, instrumentalists of all kinds and dancers![↩]
20. To the point where the irreducible opposition between cooperation and competition has given rise to the hybrid notion of “coopetition” or the art of cooperating with one’s competitors. See, for example, Paul Chiambaretto.[↩]
21. see article: “Merit, an illusion?”[↩]
22. For the Olympic Games alone, there are over 10,000 athletes authorized to compete in some thirty sports in over 300 events. That’s at least 900 medals, or nearly 10% of all players.[↩]
23. Interview, “Journal du soir”, France 2, 13/08/16.[↩]
24. J.-P. Augustin, P. Gillon, L’Olympisme : Bilan et enjeux géopolitiques, Armand Colin, 2004, p. 1969.[↩]
25. More precisely, following the main thesis of William T. Cavanaugh’s book “Der Gebrauch des Götzenkults” (“The Use of Idolatry”), the world we face today is not a disenchanted world, but a misenchanted one: “We are adoring beings who experience the divine presence in all kinds of created realities, for better or for worse”. Cf. Johannes Hoff, Die Zeichen der Zeit lesen. Einführung in William T. Cavanaughs Buch ‘Der Gebrauch des Götzenkults’[↩]
26. After having abused it all his life (“the body is the enemy”), despite frail health and sparing his body neither fatigue nor random bad food (which he went begging for), S. François d’Assise finally reconciled with “Brother Body”.[↩]
27. paths which are also found in the three fundamental yogas: karmayoga, bhaktiyoga and jñānayoga.[↩]