Olympic Ideals Still Matter

Three billion human beings are watching the 2012 Olympic Games. They will view the beauty and power of the athletes and vicariously experience the anguish and glory of the athletes. They will root for and against, and sometimes have admiration ripped out of them by performances by athletes they did not support. Three billion people will celebrate human solidarity through Olympic ideals and practice.

At the same time a mini-industry of critics attack the Olympics for its inglorious hypocrisy and tawdry commercialism. The critics attack the endless sponsors; detractors bemoan the bribes and scandals about awarding Olympics and the gargantuan expenditures by countries to stage Olympics. Opponents decry the judging scandals and the political uses whether Hitler’s 1936 attempt at legitimacy, the boycotts of the Soviet Union and USA or the coming out party staged by China’s Olympics. Finally they will lament the win at all costs  mentality of individuals or nations that lead to chemical enhanced cheating whether muscle enhanced East German women or growth retarded Chinese divers or disgraced champions ranging from Marion Jones to Ben Johnson.

You know what? It does not matter. The scandals contribute to the greatness of the accomplishments because robust ideals fail all the time, but failure does not destroy their power.

Human ideals have many functions.

•  They provide a vision to which people can aspire.
•  A good ideal guides judgment.
•  Ideals motivate people to organize attention and resources to pursue goals.
•  They help humans to connect their lives to a project that individuals believe transcends their own individual selfishness.
•  The best ideals provide moral resources to criticize actions and self correct in the name of getting better or closer to the idea.

Most worthy human endeavors are buttressed by ideals and grow through them even as people often fail to live up to them. Every professional practice such as law, engineering or medicine lives by this dynamic. A country like the United States exists as an imperfect pursuit of ideals.

Our own frailties and failures reinforce the importance and robustness of good ideals, and the Olympics represent very powerful and durable ideals. Yet the ideals live in the world we have created—London has six anti-aircraft sites to protect the games from terrorist and a huge drug testing apparatus employs hundreds of people. And yet we will watch because the ideals may be tarnished but remain beautiful.

The founding of the modern Olympics in 1896 had 214 athletes from 14 countries. Pierre de Coubertin who lead the effort believe fiercely that a reconstituted Olympics could reflect the “harmonious development of man,” and help build human peace just as the original Olympics built on a “truce” among the endlessly warring Greeks. Olympic virtues  would remind everyone that for humans “victory does not matter so much as the struggle.”

Here are six Olympic Ideals that remain true and robust in these imperfect games:

·      Olympians as Citizens

·      Competing from Desire and Love

·      Displaying Human Excellence

·      Merit and Inclusion

·      Ideals versus Imperfect Humanity

·      Human Solidarity

Olympians as Citizens:       Every athlete who reaches the Olympics achieves the pinnacle of achievement in their country or region. Being an OLYMPIAN brings great and deserved honor in itself that marks a person for life. An Olympian joins an elite citizenry of women and men who have worked hard, studied, competed and earned their position. An Olympian represents a form of human citizenship that everyone can celebrate.

Competing from Desire and Love:             98 percent of Olympians are not rich or extremely well off. Even state supported competitors live OK, but after the Olympics many will struggle to find a livelihood. Of the 36 Olympics sports, only basketball, tennis, soccer and sometimes volleyball  provide serious money as an occupation. Most Olympians hold their own jobs and scramble for sponsorship and support even as they compete in tournaments. These athletes carry on for the drive and joy of competing and for commitment to sports such as canoe, judo, shooting, trampoline, fencing or curling (woops, wrong season). These competitors pursue obscure sports with passion and skill because they love it and they enjoy winning and being the best. The Olympics vindicate and honor this pursuit.

Displaying Human Excellence                   The root meaning of athletics is struggle and achieving anything in life requires hard work, thinking and grappling with obstacles. The human condition is born in and lives through struggle; it embodies our challenge and nobility. DeCoubertin defended the morality of athletics and the Olympics upon the very French ideal that they epitomized triumphant struggle. Athletics paints a canvass where we watch and experience both the heart of struggle in competition but also the end product of superb achievement in physical and mental activities. People spend their entire lives to arrive at the Olympics, and the pinnacle offers the best that humanity can offer gathering in one place.

Merit and Inclusion             The Olympic ideal always sought inclusiveness “without discrimination” for all humans and countries to compete. This permitted self-criticism and gradually expanded to all the countries of the world but also expanded from men to women. Nonwestern sports such as judo and Taekwondo are now in competition. Nonwestern countries sponsor the games and regualry win medals. Often it meant not all athletes from their countries were the best of the best, but they represented the best of that country or region, and that was good enough. The best earn Olympic participation, and athletes in every part of the world can dream of being an Olympian.

Ideals versus Imperfect Humanity                        The critics are right, the Olympics are overly commercialized, can be distorted by politics and cost way too much, and people pursue them for mixed motives such as gaining endorsements or status in their own country. Right and so what? Humans have always been creatures of mixed motives, our very mixed motives and riven nature make the achievement of beauty and achievement in art, science, friendship and sports so remarkable. Very imperfect artists can create great art; great political achievements involve mixed motives and compromises; why should athletics be any different? The achievement through and despite our human frailties deserves respect and celebration.

Human solidarity                 For the original founders creating a liturgical stage for competition represented a means to a much deeper end--to encourage human solidarity. The Olympics for modern humanity as for ancient Greece can provide a sacramental space to celebrate the incarnation of our common and shared humanity. Like the achievements and methods of science, the achievements and method of sport transcend national and ethnic boundaries and permit us to honor and appreciate our common human embodiment and struggle.  The Olympic founders were deeply dedicated to the peace movement and believe athletics teaches that humans can compete and struggle other without hatred or becoming enemies.

In the first modern Olympics, they took the swimmers off the coast of Greece and dropped them in the Mediterranean Sea. The first winner claimed he was more concerned with keeping alive in the water than winning. That spirit still explains why the Olympic ideals matter.

Being an Athlete not a Jock

College sports seasons loom on the horizon. Talk radio hosts count down days to football; no one talks about the seven other fall college sports which is sad but predictable. I think it is a good moment to remember why athletes can be considered students and why student athletes often struggle to grow into the role as a student athlete and move beyond their socially anointed role as jocks. I think one of the keys lies in the need to shift identity from being  jock to becoming a real athlete. 

Tim Manson is a trainer who helps mentor college student athletes. He speaks about the journey many  young athletes must traverse to make sense of their entry into the world of college sports and being a student athlete from the world of high school and elite club teams where being a jock displaces being an athlete.

"We talk about how you can either be a jock or an athlete. When a jock loses something like that, they've lost their identity They put all their hopes in the football bucket, and then when it's gone, they look in the mirror and don't know who they're looking at. An athlete, when he loses something, it doesn't define who he is. An athlete makes adjustments. An athlete overcomes."

These comments capture a fundamental challenge for college athletes but especially in football and basketball. Young football and basketball  along with others have clawed their way out to succeed in football or basketball. Many believe they will be pros.


These young student athletes have invested everything in their identity as "jocks." Their parents and followers and fans and recruiting gurus do the same. Everything of value in their life and their future hinges upon being a successful jock. Yet to grow up and succeed in life, these young men and women have to grow into a different identity beyond that bestowed by being successful at sports at the high school and club level. Their real futures lie elsewhere.

Jock is a social role that becomes a way of being in life. The word speaks for itself, an old English slang for male genitals. As a role, being a jock defines how you should relate to yourself and the world.


Jocks swagger and succeed by physical prowess. They disdain study and disdain most culture because to be a jock is to be worshipped for the success gained by sheer physical achievement in all its most infantile manifestations. Jocks don't need life, they have sport.

The world young successful jocks. Jocks get girls; jocks get scholarships; jocks get passed through grades; jocks get under the table rewards in high school. Over time the young men internalize this role. Almost anything of value in their life and all their self esteem grows from being a jock. So the young men internalize the worst caricature of themselves as physical specimens who can win, drink, get laid all due to their status as jocks. Most jocks disdain study and grades because these activities dominate other subcultures like nerds and beside, being a jock will get them to college if they wish.

Take away the jock, and the person collapses. 


Jock-hood defines a social role, when the role is gone, everything disappears. People who peak at 18 from physical success have no future; they have no friends; they have no reality.All their relations are mediated by their athletic status, take that away and the relationships melt away. Like the pixillated hero of Bruce Spingsteen's Glory Days, all they have are memories, they could have been contenders.

Athletes are different. Athletes are not jocks. 

This picture of a discus and a javelin thrower captures what it means to be an athlete. Athlete derives from the Greek  ideal of contest. Athletes are human beings who master skills through struggle, effort and thought. Discus and javelin are born of war skills as were most original Olympic sports. Both required intense practice to master a complex form and technology.


The beauty of line in the picture and Greek art emphasizes athletic endeavor as not just physical activity, but rather actions imbued with form, discipline and practice. In the Greek and Olympic tradition athletes combine qualities of spirit and character--self-discipline, intense focus, reflective practice with characteristics of the mind. They intellectually mastered the form of the activity. The practice of an athlete manifested the beauty of the form.

Successful athletes embody character and form in achievement. An athlete masters the form through knowledge, practice and self correction. The form emerges in the crucible of competition where individuals watch other athletes compete.Loss can teach as much as victory, sometimes even more because losing demands an emotional and intellectual challenge to get better.


This is why athletes are not jocks.


The social role of being a jock internalized by young competitors confers social status and rewards but limits whom they can become. As a role its worth depends upon external perks and validation, winning, praise, adoring fans and groupies. A jock embodies a wrong headed masculinity based upon sheer brute strength. Being a jock as a social status grants privileges and excuses failures. All it depends upon is visibility in sport carried over into social dominance in other domains.

Good athletes study their craft and game. Good athletes need to be learners, one of the very activities reject by jocks. 


Success grows from learned mastery or patterns and skills and integrating them into team play and surprise and uncertainty of competition.  This is really the challenge of college athletics (not sports) to help the young men who enter as jocks to grow into being athletes.

One Short Sports: The Logic of Racing & Diving

In his classic "Lose Yourself" Eminem begins:

Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted-One moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

His song etches the challenge of the Olympic moment. Each Olympic moment presents this, just one shot. Each race, each game, each point accumulate but end in this one moment that Olympian athletes have fought their entire lives to achieve.

His song came to mind as I watched the Olympic trials especially the titanic races between Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte which kept ending with .05 to .2 second differentials. I realized again how a certain set of sports give athletes only one shot with no room for error. 

I think back to the winter Olympic and the incredible performance of American skier Linsey Vonn collapsing, sobbing and  crying on her husband's shoulder after her gold medal run in the women's alpine Olympic. The scary intense no room for error run   reminded me of the song. 

She cried from joy, satisfaction, triumph and relief. On the same night I watched Shaun White simply soar at a different level than the rest of his competition in the snow board half pipe as he glided, slung, twisted and contorted his way to a stunning, dare I say it, awesome, performance winning the gold medal in the half pipe. White whooped and hollered and hugged. Later he played air guitar at the end of the national anthem on the podium. His whoops and hollers reflected jubilation and triumph and relief.



Why the relief? During the winter Olympics I realized several things about  sports. Many winter sports incur far more danger than your typical summer sports. I mean careening down bumpy slopes and flying off ledges at 100 kilometers an hour; luging around tracks in astronaut training speeds; turning, twisting and launching into the air all entail real risk of life and limb. Lindsey Vonn skied with a huge bruise on her thigh and had to overcome several major injuries since her last Olympics. Askel Svindel returned from a battered and broken body to win the men's ski gold, for as he put it in his blog, "ten seconds" to stand and know you had done it with your run. A lugger died.


These athletes bring a level of courage and pushing the edge that does not exist in most other sports because of the real physical danger that courts them at every second. They  are not encased in cars or kevlar, just them, their bodies, equipment and the elements. 

The summer sports generally do not bring a similar level of danger, but they still express the incredible pressure and naked end of pure competition. One wins, everyone else loses. Just like the winter Olympics many of the sports represent just one shot sports.


 "One shot" sports differ from many sports that offer theme and variations over and over again with ample opportunities in the flow of a game to overcome lapses and still win. Soccer, volleyball, baseball, basketball all unfold as continuous and repetitive plays during their allotted time with ebbs and flows, lots of second chances. But one shot sports present a different psychological and performance profile. Athletes have literally just one shot with no room for error.

These sports really provide just  one shot. Just one chance with the athlete or team alone, waiting, the bell sounds and the individual is off. It all rides on one ride, one run, dive, one row. All the races, diving, swimming, gymnastics, rowing play out with the same excruciating intensity. Much like the vault in gymnastics, an explosive instant second where years of preparation play out in seconds alone. The point of the game here: everything is on the line just once.One error, one nanosecond hesitation, one false move and the dream disappears.

All the athletes who arrive at the Olympics stand for the best of the best and the best their country can offer in this activity. They seek to embody the Greek ideal of excellence in form, strength and performance. Leave aside the commercialism, the crassness, the sponsorships, the bloated nationalism and amid the noise and carnival, just as existed in the original Olympics, it comes down to the one athlete, one woman, one man, waiting on the starting block, intense, focus, coiled embodying years of training and work. It is the moment Olympic cameras love to catch for good reason, just as they zoom in on the ecstasy of victory and of loss.


I really admire the character and moral intensity of athletes in one shot sports. The athlete has to bring all his or her  training and life long commitment to a pinpoint of focus. They need mental and physical discipline to overcome  past failures and past successes. They must be totally present in that one moment, as Eminem advised, they need to "lose yourself." 

They need flawless visioning of the action and the ability to execute and adapt to any changed conditions at the same time. Above all they must find ways to not let the pressure and adrenaline and cortisol rushes of having everything depend upon this one chance and to being it home.


At the end of a one shot run, every Olympic athlete can mimic Vonn's screams or White's hollers; joy, triumph and release and relief. They earned them all.

Pistorius, Cheetahs, Fairness and Augmented Humans

Last year the  NBA banned a new shoe, one with springs in the soles designed to enable basketball players to jump higher. For a sport where the physical size and talent of athletes surpass the traditional physical space of the sport, this makes perfect sense. It once again reminds us how important it is to control technology to keep the athletic accomplishment scaled to human beings.

The press release announced that "Under league rules, players may not wear any shoe during a game that creates an undue competitive advantage," The key to most interventions like this lies in the equal playing field defense or the fairness argument. If players/teams of equal talent and skill compete, then the ethics of sports competition requires that the outcome be determined by the combination of skill, practice, commitment and energy that makes up the essence of athleticism. If one player/team wore different equipment and created a different outcome based upon the edge created solely by the equipment, then that equipment should be banned or everyone should have equal access to it. Sports, unlike modern sail boat racing is about level playing field competition not technological arms races.

I've argued before that one of the central moral attributes of athletics is that it asks human beings to develop their human physical and mental capacities to achieve a level of excellence, what Aristotle and the Greeks would call a virtue. This defense of athletics argues that it exists as a central human practice in most cultures. It develops as an expression of physical intelligence, but also as  serious play priming individuals to skills needed to defend their tribe or community.

This drive to perfect  human capacities and skills through games grounds  why we both play and enjoy sports. We connect to the drive for excellence and the expansion of human potential in the best athletes as well as enjoying the unfolding of real skill wrought from practice and commitment.

This is why issues of technology is so vexing for sports. Most sports are mediated by technologies whether it be soccer (balls and shoes), running (clothes and shoes), tennis (rackets and shoes) etc. Even ones that seem minimally subject to it such as swimming through water turn out to be vulnerable to technological transformation through buoyant and streamlined suits. Two years ago world records regularly fell to the swimmers wearing the newest technology with technology trumping athletic excellence and level competition.

But the issue of technology and humanness has now gone far beyond policing shoes and swim suits. Track and field has grappled with a a very interesting struggle over the last three years with decisions and evidence about double amputee Oscar Pistorius who is a South African sprinter. He runs on two prosthetic cybernetic legs called "Cheetahs." Football players and other athletes have used them in competitive sports, but Pistorius sprints and no one can quite figure out if he is a human racer with the cybernetic legs or something else. The cheetahs are integrated into his nervous system but based upon flexible paddle like feet. At first he was outlawed because of the fear that the internal springs gave him advantages, but the Court of Arbitration for Sport ordered him eligible for the Olympics.

Now a new set of tests conducted by scientists hired by his own advocates have concluded that the lighter weight of his prosthetic enables him to cycle faster in running, roughly 15 percent faster than a normal human male runner. More recent studies are unclear, but all make clear that the fundamental dynamics of his running differ from two legged runners and might provide some substantial differences. In NASCAR this is handled by putting serious limits upon the technologies used so that everyone has same technology but may win by superior tinkering or efficiency maximization.

Two different issues arise here. The first is the equal playing field or fairness argument. If one player uses a new technology that provides a unique advantage only on him or her, then it should be outlawed, or as initially happened in swimming, everyone can adopt the new technology so the field is equalized. Although in the end the technology so outstripped the ability to regulate, that swimming went back to basics. The spread of composite rackets in tennis represents the same evolution. The competitions may generate new records that are enabled by the technology, but at least it is a fair race. The battle over Pistorius and his prosthetic legs reflects this moral argument about fairness. If the initial data is right, then he should not be allowed to compete with other human legged runners. If it comes in as equal or equivalent, then any changes in the technology must be retested for comparative advantages.

But the deeper issue is the one manifest in the swimming controversies and the decisions to back off from the high tech race that lead to newer innovations and meaningless technologically augmented records even if everyone used the new suits. (This resembles the arguments over steroid enhanced baseball records--if not everyone used them, they should not be respected because it is unfair advantage and not true reflection of what might have happened if everyone had used it.) But with steroids or swimming technology and most clearly with the Cheetah prosthetic, the question arises, is this really human athletics or sports anymore?

In these cases augmented humans are now participating, but it is not clear that equal humans are now competiting against one another. This is not about regular human beings using structured diets and intense effort training to achieve their excellence. The point here is that the human being with his or her work ethic, focus and integrated mastery of mind, emotion and skill achieves the outcome, not enhanced musculature or cybernetically or suit enhanced bodies. This person is no longer  strictly human and these are not strictly fair outcomes

This argument has lots of holes, but we need to keep thinking about why athletic achievement should be kept to human beings, not augmented more than human human beings.

Olympic Virtues

The 2010 Winter Olympics ended on Sunday. I'll miss them even as I understand that the power of the Olympics derives from the fact that they occur once very four years. Only once every four years do athletes journey from the five continents of the five rings to gather together. Only once every four years does such an array of talent across such a diversity of sport arrive, live and compete together. Only once every four years can the sheer talent, power and beauty of athletics rise above the commercialism, communalism, jingoism and egoism that swirls around it. The raw imprint of the images of performance seer through the chaff and capture why the ancient Greeks enshrined athletics at the center of their achievements and art and why they believed that the human body reflected and perfected the human mind.

For the Greeks athletic achievement and the development of body and mind reflected virtue. For them it represented the highest form of moral life. Virtue arose from practice and refinement of a way of being in the world; it grew from building habits of thought and focus and disciplined learning of how to approach situations, judge them and act in a manner consistent with virtue.

The opposite of virtue consisted of weakness of will. The weakness emerged from both the failure of judgment, of an inability to see and comprehend the stakes in a situation. This failure of judgment was compounded by the inability to follow through on action. Even if the individual knew the right action, he or she could find the emotional and executive willingness to act in a manner consistent with what their judgment directed.

The Olympics illuminated powerful virtues that lies at the center of athletics. Let me mention a few.

Courage and Fortitude: The athletes competed in sports that require them to face considerable physical and mental challenges. More than a few of the sports courted significant physical danger. The athletes know the risks and many of them, at this elite level, probably all of them, have struggled through physical and emotional adversity and grappled with facing and carrying on in the face of failure.

Faith and Sacrifice:  The athletes believe. They see a possibility for themselves. This vision inspires them and gives them the energy to sacrifice time and opportunity to master the craft of their sport. They give up personal lives and personal pleasures and personal interests to pursue with a single minded devotion the vision of achievement. They practice and practice and practice and condition and condition and condition forgoing many other aspects of life. This discipline and sacrifice is infused with their faith in themselves and their sport and their goals.

Perseverance and Conscientiousness: Elite athletes arrive at their success through a path of failure and learning. One striking fact about many of the athletes was how many of those who succeeded were attending their second or third Olympics. While age ultimately robs athletes of the range of talent, energy and physical, Olympic competition requires robust experience and tempered mastery of the emotional and cognitive discipline of not  choking or losing focus under the pressure of visibility and competition. At this level micro seconds matter in downhills and turns or millimeters in moguls or skating leaps or biathlons. Every competitor at this level has devoted endless time to honing the smallest aspect of their craft and practicing and learning and refining and learning again from mistakes or the successes of competitors. No one arrives here through an easy road, even if it looks easy, that's part of the art of athletes.

I could go on but I hope the point is clear that at its core athletics remains a moral endeavor of a human being stretching and expanding themselves and reminding us of human possibilities. A colleague of mine summarized it quite well when she described searching for a person with:

"The passion of the Olympic hockey players, the joie de vivre of the snowboarders, and the amazing combination of versatility and dedication exhibited in the Nordic combine."