Why sport matters

There is a long discussion going on at Peter Rukavina’s Reinvented about Canada’s Olympic team. It started as a post about the CBC and streaming media, but morphed into a series of comments about why Canadians celebrate “mediocraty.”

I weighed in with these comments:

All of our athletes at this year’s games were chosen because they were ranked top 12 in their sport. I think anything better than 12 then is an improvement and when you see a guy like Rick Say swim the race of his life against the field of the century and finish sixth, you HAVE to cheer that on. Why? Because he never finished better and therefore he delivered an excellent performance. A perect performance. It was just not as fast as Ian Thorpe and four other men. What more could he do?

And then there are the heartbreaks, where athelets come ranked high and have a bad day and finish early. Sherraine Mackay the fencer was like that. She should have won gold but got knocked out by a Greek no-chancer. It was a huge win for the Greek woman…did you see the look on her face? She had just pulled off the best performance of her life, beating one of the top ranked competitors in the world. Amazing. And for Mackay, it was heartbreak at the Olympics, but how many of us know just how good this woman has been? She has medalled at 15 world cup competitions since 1999 and won gold in seven world class events. She fought the worst performance of her entire international career in Athens, but does that make her a loser? On any given day she can be the best in the world.

This is why I watch sports. They are the only thing on TV and radio that IS unpredictable. Even the news offers few surprises. The only real reality TV is athletics. And it’s gripping stuff to see the top people in the world trying to find an edge that will grant them the ultimate reward.

As for only cheering number one, I’m not too hung up on that. Sports doesn’t really matter. As much as I love it, it’s not like winning the Stanley Cup is as important as being a Nobel Peace Laureate. It’s compelling to watch people try to win and I like celebrating their acheivments, however measured. But finishing first is not the sole benefit of sport. Sport produces people who, if they undertake their activities with a good sense of balance, grow to understand what it means to win and lose, to work in a team, or to become deeply aware of themselves and their limitations. Taken in a larger context and with a balance on training, winning and participation, sport can leave us with members of society who transfer their pursuit of excellence to realms that truly benefit us. In that respect, sport, appropirately played, can be a great practice field for transformation by understanding ourselves, our partners and what it takes to overcome conditions and deal with success and failure.

Most of our Olympians are not professionals, and they will go back into our communities as people who have a deep understanding of these things and who can share them with others. I think, even though it sounds over the top, this kind of approach is a benefit to our society, where so often people are told NOT to rely on their own resources, creativity and spirit.