Battle in Print: Why does Sport have to have a Purpose?

Dan Travis, 27 September 2006

Over the past ten years it appears that sport has taken on several new roles. Throughout history, society has looked to sport to help cure it of its perceived ills, be it as a remedy to halt the decline of the imperial stock or a way to incorporate workers into broader political activity. It is the variety of functions and the way these functions change the meaning of sport itself that characterise today’s instrumentalism. I divide these functions into three categories: social inclusion, health, and behaviour modification. This process has come to redefine what sport is. By a political process, sport has been downgraded to mean virtually any kind of physical activity, stripped of its intrinsically ‘elitist’ element. Sport is now used to assist and legitimise egalitarian government policies whose aim is to raise self-esteem or expand access to the underprivileged.

Those in charge of sport have prioritised increasing participation over raising performance. This is a symptom of sport being hijacked by the ever-expanding health promotion lobby. In the past, those concerned with the health of the nation looked to sport and games to improve the condition of its subjects. The difference in the UK today is that sport has become virtually synonymous with physical health. Individuals are applauded, encouraged, and soon to be prescribed by GPs, to participate in sport, with good health as the ultimate goal. Raising the standard of their performance is an incidental by-product. The raising of self-esteem, ‘de-stressing’ and having fun have all been cited as individual needs that can be met by playing sport. In fact, the individualising of health and sporting goals through the personal trainer system relies on weight loss and health-related targets and recasts pure competitive instincts as ‘unhealthy’ or ‘addictive’.

So successful has this intimate binding of the concepts of health and sport been that physical activity is now being used continually for other social projects. In attempting to modify the behaviour of children, sport is held up as a morally wholesome activity. In this respect the athlete’s role has changed somewhat from performer to celebrity role model. Sport has traditionally been seen as a vehicle for introducing discipline and self-sacrifice, and therefore has lent itself to ‘setting a good example’. However, today’s athlete is now expected to embody a far more sanitised and expanding set of behaviour codes. The role of the sportsperson in society has also expanded. Meaning is now attached to their private lives, their relations with other athletes and their opinions on everything under the sun. They are the ‘uber-celebrities’ because, unlike many non-sporting celebs, they are where they are by merit; there is no question of their right to be famous. It is in this way that falls from public grace can now occur on and off the pitch and on a far greater scale and frequency than ever before. Even those associated with the athlete are given de facto celebrity status – the WAGs (wives and girlfriends) of the England football teamin the 2006 World Cup being the best example.

Despite the expansion of sport’s meaning and presence today, conspicuous by its absence is the desire to be competitive and the lauding of competition. Speaking to tennis players who are new to the sport and join my online club, they continually emphasise that they are not competitive and want to play just for fun. This reasoning seems to be true of people I speak to involved in most sports. In fact, most of those taking up physical activity now are actively hostile to competition, regarding it as unhealthy and even pathological. In today’s society the competitive person is seen as ‘sad’ and is the subject of ridicule, trying too hard or ‘pushing themselves too far’.

When sport is married to health, injury prevention also becomes a common feature of the sporting agenda. The healthy individual is injury-free. In this context, doing anything that could cause injury is regarded a highly irresponsible. Competition, however, will engender injury and if injury prevention becomes a key factor in sport, then the building of a robust competitor will be stigmatised. As a result, the more complex competitive psyche is seen as far removed from the modern concept of sport as merely physical activity to increase your health. Even when it is obvious that the competitive soul is fitter and in better condition than most, their status is perceived as being lower than that of their non-competitive, regular gym-going, healthy eating, injury-free brethren. Having a competitive drive seems to spoil the almost holy status of the Healthy Person.

That the competitive is undesirable and at best problematic is seen most clearly in children’s sport. The arrival of the non-competitive, movement and skills based PE lesson and the disappearance of sports day have been widely commented on, and judged a cultural loss driven by an overly anxious, inclusive agenda. What is not discussed, however, is the problematisation of competition. The fact that winners and losers are established during competition and that this may affect children’s self-esteem is seen as potentially damaging. Although not objecting in principle, parents and teachers would rather steer clear of this threat and not subject children to the activity, instead opting for something ‘nicer’. For the young children I teach, ‘Winning is not the only thing’ is now a mantra. They use it when we introduce them to competition and we hear it uttered continually.

Health and behaviour modification have changed the meaning of sport in the contemporary psyche and have tended to oust its competitive dynamic. But there is a peculiarly moral streak in some aspects of modern sport that further damages the competitive element. This is most obvious with the running phenomenon in the UK. Running has become increasingly popular, yet the standard of distance running has decreased. As Alan Buckingham (5.4.2005) pointed out on spiked:

During the 1980s the qualifying time to obtain guaranteed entry to the London Marathon for a senior male was 2 hours 40 minutes; today it is 3 hours. Put another way, if the old qualifying time still remained, this year a mere 186 British male runners would have made the standard.

Buckingham cites two reasons for this. Firstly, injury avoidance is prioritised in the training of young athletes. This means the real problems they face to become top athletes are avoided rather than dealt with. Secondly, running for other people, in the form of charities, is a precondition for entry into the main events in the UK. Serious runners who compete for their own improvement struggle to gain entry. Such an approach places ‘participation’ in place of performance. In the case of the London Marathon, the competitive part of the race is actually separated from the main body and considered to be a sideshow to the main event where Bernie Clifton and his comedy ostrich compete alongside rhinos and any number of fancy dressed human beings.

I would argue that sport is totally ‘pointless’ and wholly arbitrary. This is its essence and value. Many spheres of human activity do have a clear meaning and serious objective outside of themselves. Because sport does not, humans get to experience something unique whilst participating in it. The pleasure we take in sport is in its capacity to allow us to lose ourselves in the moment and use our skill and senses to achieve objectives that are wholly artificial and serve no utilitarian purpose. When sport is given a social objective outside of itself, be it healthy lifestyle creation or providing role models, sport is degraded – it loses its true spirit. Competitive sport is uniquely selfish. Normal social rules are suspended and are absent when playing games. Sport is a space where normal rules do not apply. With instrumentalist measures, this space becomes occupied and the transportive, playful pleasure of physical games is dampened and corrupted. Again, the unique human experience that participating in sport offers is sacrificed.

When sport becomes instrumental in government health policies and is reduced in meaning to mere physical activity, neither sport nor health benefits. Competitive sports, especially team sports, push the individual to excel. In order to win, the individual will subject themselves, time and again, to physical pressures that cannot be replicated in isolation in the gym. Sometimes you just have to keep up – to beat the opposition, to satisfy the requirements of the team, or simply keep your place. The healthy gym routine and good diet is no substitute for this robust activity. It is by keeping sport free from instrumentalist measures and playing it for its own sake that it can continue to benefit humanity.

Dan Travis is director of OverTheNet

 References

Running isn’t just for fun, Alan Buckingham, spiked, 5 April 2005

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