Citius. Altius. Fortius: The idealised portrait of the ancient Olympic Games, which inspired the modern Olympic movement, depicts a pure, quasi-religious celebration dedicated to the joys of athletic exertion and achievement. The reality was quite the opposite. The ancient Olympic Games were brutally competitive events. Athletes cheated; people were bribed; and the Greek City States erected gaudy tributes to their successful champions. Not to win at Olympia all-too-often ended in civic humiliation and personal disgrace. How little has changed.
CRITICISING SPORT in contemporary New Zealand is a bit like
criticising God. Actually, it’s worse. Because, when it comes to religious
devotion, God ranks a poor second.
So much of New Zealanders’ national identity is bound up with
their country’s sporting prowess that they recoil from the slightest suggestion
that it is not an unquestionable good.
Even when the conduct of New Zealand sportsmen (the gender
specificity is deliberate) can only be described as profoundly shocking and
anti-social, the behaviour is presented publicly as a purely individual
betrayal of sporting ideals. Most significantly, they are pilloried for their
failure to uphold the values expected of public “role models” for young New
Zealanders. That sport itself might be the culprit is never permitted to cross
the collective New Zealand mind.
Officially, sport is about the pursuit of excellence.
At the individual level it embraces the pursuit and
attainment of specific physical goals. More generally, it seeks to advance the
boundaries of human capacity and achievement. In the words of the Olympic
motto: Citius—Altius—Fortius Faster— Higher—Stronger.
Team sport folds this quest for individual excellence into
the creation of a competitive whole greater than the sum of its parts. The
successful sports team is something organic: a collective expression of human
purpose and human will that at once transforms and transcends its individual
components.
Unofficially – that is to say what everybody acknowledges to
be true, but will not publicly confirm – sport is about winning.
The idealised portrait of the ancient Olympic Games, which
inspired the modern Olympic movement, depicts a pure, quasi-religious
celebration dedicated to the joys of athletic exertion and achievement. The
reality was quite the opposite. The ancient Olympic Games were brutally
competitive events. Athletes cheated; people were bribed; and the Greek City
States erected gaudy tributes to their successful champions. Not to win at
Olympia all-too-often ended in civic humiliation and personal disgrace.
Nothing has changed. Who among our Olympic losers are feted
and rewarded? The lucrative sponsorships; the ubiquitous television and
newspaper advertisements in which Olympic athletes lend their lustre to every
sort of commercial endeavour; these are not offered to the individuals and
teams who fail to bring home the gold, silver and bronze medals New Zealanders
covet. To the victors – and only the victors – go the spoils.
But if sport is about success, then it must also be about
failure. Unfortunately, a society that only celebrates winners will find it
increasingly difficult to treat its losers with anything but contempt. Even
worse, the inculcation of the win-at-all-costs ethos into team sport risks
elevating the key elements of collective success: loyalty, obedience and
orthodoxy; over the more socially valuable qualities of altruism, tolerance and
innovation.
The elevation of sporting prowess also risks privileging the
physical over the cerebral; the fit over the unfit; the instinctive over the
deliberative. It leads, inexorably, towards a society in which “hard” counts
for much more than “soft”; the strong for much more than the weak; the wealthy
for much more than the poor; the masculine for much more than the feminine; and
the straight for much more than the gay.
If this sounds like a description of our own neoliberal
society it’s because neoliberalism has learned a great deal from the political
economy of sport. It is certainly no coincidence that modern management theory
borrows heavily from the theory and practice of building and coaching
successful sporting teams.
Businesspeople, bureaucrats, even academic administrators,
display a growing fascination with the techniques employed by sports coaches to
foster and develop “leadership” within their teams. In more and more of our
large institutions employees find themselves grouped into workplace “teams”
presided over by management-appointed “team-leaders”. These latter individuals
combine the roles of monitor and exhorter. Inevitably, the team values of
loyalty, obedience and orthodoxy become the indicators by which employees are
assessed. Ironically, they are also the values which lead directly to
organisational stagnation and decline.
The incidents arising out of the Chiefs rugby team’s “Mad
Monday” celebrations in the Waikato town of Matamata have been presented to the
public as the deeply regretted failure of a number of young sportsmen to live
up to the ideals of their code.
Alternatively, the behaviour in question, far from being
aberrant, could be seen as entirely consistent with the values of twenty-first
century professional sport. These young men are paid to live in a “hard”
culture where the slightest indication of “softness” will be taken as proof of
either femininity, or queerness, or both. In such a context, the hiring of a
stripper would not be seen as a disaster-in-the-making, but as a perfectly
acceptable opportunity for group gratification and solace. They had failed to
win the championship: this was how they dealt with being losers.
It wasn’t an aberration – it was the norm.
This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 9 August 2016.
