STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

Apart from the issues you and your commenters rightly flagged in your post on the Olympic games, it seems to me that another problem is that so few these days view competitive sporting spectacles through the lens of perspective and proportion – which is how properly-formed and thinking adults naturally view everything.

Too many now look care about sporting displays for the superficial appeal: valuing the mere mechanical exercise of showing who can run the fastest or  jump the highest or hit a fuzzy ball most accurately. To do so is to miss the true point and value of sport entirely.

Unless the mechanical exercise displays some higher transcendental value then sports are nothing more than childrens’ games played by grown ups. There is a word that stands for the process of imbuing physical activity with transcendent value. I heard it a lot when growing up but it is now seldom heard, if at all: sportsmanship.

Having cast aside the concept of sportsmanship, athletes and their audiences – along with society generally –  have all been diminished, no?

Unless it is undertaken in the spirit of sportsmanship then even at the highest level of technical competence a sporting display is of no abiding value at all and is undeserving of a grownup’s time or attention.

On the other hand, when an athlete performs their sporting exercise and meets its technical challenges  in a spirit honorably committed to  fairplay,  bravely and selflessly demonstrating respect for their competitors and their audience then the spectacle cannot help but rise to something far greater than mere physical display.

True sportsmanship transcends mere games and whenever and wherever brought to bear illuminates what is most valuable and life-affirming in the human spirit.  As you have pointed out many times, what ever is life-affirming is of God.

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Chariots of Fire, (1981). It’s a rare film exploring sportsmanship and the question of if, and how, sporting achievement might surpass the merely physical spectacle and attain transcendent value.

I often feel like the only one in the audience to ever watch that film and lament the obsessive approach to running of Harold Abrahams to the exclusion of all else in life. Abrahams at one point even says: “ If I can’t win, I won’t run” and describes his gift as “ a compulsion with me, a weapon I can use” and his Olympic games experience as “ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence”. How very sad.

My belief is that most competitors at the current Olympics, their audiences – and the readers of most blogs today-  would see nothing at all wrong with Abrahams’ approach to sport because winning is everything to the unthinking man – but merely winning a sporting race is not the point at all and has no abiding value unless performed in the spirit of modesty, generosity and grace.

Much better and more abiding to do as Abraham’s bete noir, Eric Liddell did, and recognise that the whole point is not simply to win but “to  run a straight race.” There and there alone lies sport’s abiding value.

As I looked in briefly on these Olympics I saw people who will win a medal and have their names entered in a record book but who will never experience what Liddell saw as the necessary consequence of a display of sportsmanship where: “the world stands back in wonder.”

The above video offers an example, from my own country, of the transcendence that sport can rise to when  undertaken by men who embrace the quality of true sportsmanship.

Pay  special attention from about the one-minute mark.  Even after all these years, let the world stand back in wonder of these two true sportsmen.

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