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[Wolf O'Donnell]

So, I thought I'd leach the fun out of the Olympics by starting a contro thread about the Olympics. Unfortunately, the BBC technically beat me to it with this:

The Olympics - you can hardly miss them. They're said to have cost more than government cuts in the welfare budget and with the rows over security, Zil lanes, empty seats and the ruthless protection of the Olympic brand it's perhaps too easy to forget that the purpose of all this is the essentially trivial pursuit of sport. Have we come to demand so much from modern sport that we've forgotten its true purpose and value? As the cost of major sporting events like the Olympics has escalated we demand and expect more of them; to make us better, healthier people, to promote social inclusion, contribute to the economy and even peace among nations. That all may sound farfetched from the comfort our or sofas and our ever expanding waistlines, but it's worth recalling that morality is at the core of the spread of modern sport around the world. Pierre De Coubertin, founder of the Olympic Movement, was one of many who thought sport was morally improving - a way of shaping character, transmitting values and challenging anti-social behaviour. "Play up and play the game" feels a long way from the mores of the modern professional footballer, but even here, can we still see the faintly beating heart of the morality play that makes sport so compelling - with its themes of challenge, defeat and redemption? Or in the era of professional corporatized sport is that a hopelessly romantic notion that has fallen victim to the win at all cost Nietzschean Ubermensch? What exactly is the moral value of sport?

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk...rammes/b01l7wtw

I would say there is none.

The row over empty seats is clear. Privileged people were given tickets, tickets they clearly did not want, whilst the average Joe couldn't get their hands on them. People who have technically already paid for the Olympics through tax money, aren't being given the right to be at the Olympic events to cheer on Team GB.

And don't get me started on how the Olympics is the Orwellian 1984 lottery of today. Just go to the BBC website and have a look at its front page. It's not as bad today, but earlier on in the week, the Olympics completely dominated the page, pushing important news articles down. Articles on Syria were nowhere near the top. In fact, many of the non-Olympic articles were pushed well below the top portion of the screen. BBC News 24 practically aired nothing but the Olympics, to the detriment of other news. Why? What purpose did it serve? The BBC already has outlets devoted to the Olympics; it doesn't need the News Channel to focus on it.

Edited by Wolf O'Donnell, 03 August 2012 - 02:29 PM.

[J-Roc]

Sports keep the worker bees working.

[Selena]

Stuff like the Olympics and popular sporting leagues - both in the US and the rest of the world - are often more about putting on a show than about the actual sports. That's not automatically a bad thing when you see it as an offshoot of dramatic theater. I mean, athletes and their handlers get paid way too damn much. You won't see me defending the money side of the whole thing. But sporting events should certainly have a noticeable position in society.

Reason: Because before you had World Cups, you had World Wars.

We don't care about sports because of what they are - nobody in their right mind really cares if a sportsball ends up in a goal or not. We care about sports because of what they represent on a subconscious level. They have, from the very beginning, been metaphors for warfare. A non-violent way to vent our natural strategic aggression. Boil sport down to the absolute basics. They're about strategy, teamwork, creating effective defensive and offensive tactics, physical exertion, pushing through pain, triumphing over great odds, wanting to see the other team in tatters, and fear of loss.

Old leaders considered war to be like a sporting event that involved a ton of national bragging rights. It declined in the modern age, and sports, in turn, became popular to the point of media domination (whereas they were just mildly amusing "games" during the age of routine warfare).

That's the reason why sports are so "dramatic" and often play out like theater. Even board games stem from the same mental source. Chess is pure strategy, for example. It allows us to safely control those natural urges. Some of us are very mild and don't have those tendencies. And that's good. More time for reading and whatnot. But others have them. Often in a very strong, driving way that, unless harnessed, is going to end up being destructive. Kind of like how certain dogs have extremely high energy levels and prey drives, while others are mellow. And unless you work the high energy dogs, they're going to kill rabbits and dig up your yard out of boredom (agility training is effectively "sport for dogs" - which is why you always see shepherd dogs playing such prominent roles there due to their high energy).



I was never too interested in sports offered through my school, so I was never on a team when I was there, but I'd been on private teams before that. Softball and soccer, plus street hockey with friends. It was quite enjoyable and productive. I'm antisocial as all hell, but I still like being part of a capable team. I'd actually recommend that - barring some kind of disability that would prevent it - most kids take on some kind of sport at least once in their lives. It vents energy, keeps you fit, and builds social skills by forcing you to work together as a team.

But because it's such good "theater," priorities get skewed all the time. There's still good to it, though.



As for the Olympics hogging the limelight, that's only because they happen once every four years and involve a lot of national bragging rights (another comparison to the old routine of regular warfare). Regular sporting events are over-the-top sometimes, but they don't usually make it onto the front page unless something big happens.

[Egann]

I've run cross country, I've dabbled in saber fencing, target shooting, and kyaking, I've played more than my fair share of soccer and baseball, I've done a little chess, and I was my highschool tennis team's captain...kind of. I think that sports are a MANDATORY part of a well rounded education. Perhaps not as important as arithmetic, but at least as important as spelling and biology. And I'm an A-B student; I'm not saying this because I did well in sports and poorly at school.

Unfortunately, there aren't too many examples of sports being done right. The best way for me to show you what I mean is to contrast sports done well and sports done poorly.


Sports done well are all about self exploration, self improvement, and self discipline. Learning how you react to stress with experience, practicing until your skills apex, learning to make good decisions when adrenaline is clouding your judgement. And, perhaps most importantly, being a good looser before becoming a gracious winner.

The things you can learn about yourself and others in sports are staggering, too. I've seen tennis games go on for hours between equals only for one well-fought point to unravel a player psychologically. The match was over five minutes later. A painful reminder that you must be quite Zen about things and detached from both victory and defeat to actually do your best.

Most sports are not well done. They've become stat-wars, divisional feuds, and, in the case of the Olympics, a platform for national bragging rights. Not only are the stakes way too high, but the emphasis is on the wrong things. No wonder people cheat when they can.

I'm not going to say that this is just because the players are paid way too much. In the case of baseball and basketball, that's probably true. Paying star players too much causes competition over team slots. Basketball in particular is seen as "the way out" for kids in poor urban areas. Success could mean a scholarship or better, so the competition is ridiculous. The stakes are high for all the wrong reasons.

But football players need to be paid a lot because they get the snot beat out of them and have short careers filled with medical expenses, and tennis players sometimes do appearances for free. It all depends on the sport and, more importantly, the people playing it.

[SteveT]

I have to agree with Selena on the "metaphor for war" aspect.

Sports do teach important lessons: commitment, discipline, various forms of endurance, and teamwork. Are they the only ways to learn those values and worthy of the pedestal they're put on? Not really. Just like a lot of people don't use calculus in their own lives, even fewer people need the ability to ignore a sprained ankle long enough to throw the winning pass.

And that's where the war part comes in. Sports satisfy the competitive, tribal drives in people. Some feeling it stronger than others. Some, like me, don't get it it all, but it does have an overall civilizing effect. People want to be the best at something and without outlets like sports, they'll just become the best at burning down some guy's farm and dragging his wife home with them. We don't need to go to war with the next town over, because we can prove that we're better than them through an arbitrary ritual that we've trained our teenagers to perform.

It's that same tribal mentality and war metaphor that causes most of the problems associated with sports, too. You'd rather funnel that uniform money to buying a better chemistry lab? Why don't we just burn down our own farms and put all our women on the bus to Shelbyville? You don't even care about this town at all, do you?. It's the same misplaced, primal aggression toward anyone who's not us that fuels sports rivalries, hazing, cliques, crazy dads, and making town heroes out of quarterbacks. People take sports way too seriously, because they're a stand-in for one of the most serious institutions humanity has.

[J-Roc]

People take sports way too seriously, because they're a stand-in for one of the most serious institutions humanity has.

That being?

[Khallos]

The branding of it all has really got me down as well as the inane focus on it. When an earthquake in Iran is at the end of the news bulletin, things have gone wrong* (but we have grabbed a gold and silver today!). The Olympics has become so aggressively in your face in the UK its ridiculous, perhaps sport still has a moral value - but when the "amateur" competition that is the Olympics has to be so heavily branded it makes the whole thing farcical.

Have to agree that today sport is no longer sport, its transcended its original meaning into something not quite real. People use performance enhancing drugs, people obsessively watch a bunch of men run 100m in a straight line and go mad over it (I find sprints dull, its just me), parents put their life behind their child's success, advertising campaigns wax and wane depending on a sport's stars fame - hell, people get injured and die when certain teams play. It seems there's little to do with what I feel is the classic spirit of sport any more, though I imagine that's a thing that has been jaded for thousands of years.


*disasters in non-western countries unless truely cataclysmic are of course always of low priority in the news.

[SteveT]

People take sports way too seriously, because they're a stand-in for one of the most serious institutions humanity has.

That being?

War. That would be war.

[Masamune]

In fifty years, when we are making the transition to giant mecha battles being the center of our entertainment, people will start singing: "Sports? What are they good for?"