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Notes
1. I discuss this amateur rendering of sport and its successor professional view, which is the second conception of sport I feature in this section, in greater detail in my essay, ‘Broad Internalism, Deep Conventions, Moral Entrepreneurs, and Sport,’ (Citation2012).
2. This amateur grounded aversion to strategy extended to non-athletic games of the era as well. As Del Mar noted, ‘in the nineteenth century, [chess] players were wont to accept every sacrifice offered (for it was allegedly thought to be ungentlemanly not to) leading to short, brilliant games’ (Citation2011, 432). The shortness of the game, of course, had to do with each player’s taking whatever chess piece was sacrificed, which eliminated the strategic point of offering it as a sacrifice in the first place. For my critique of Del Mar’s overall account, see Morgan (Citation2014).
3. Their head-to-head struggle for dominance was especially heated in the early period of the modern Olympic Games, roughly from the 1906 Athens Games to the 1924 Paris Games. For an excellent account of this rivalry, see Dyreson (Citation1998).
4. I say incipient professional conception because at this early stage, there was still suspicion of the pure profit motive among professional athletes, of athletes whose primary or only concern was to make money off their athletic exploits. As Rader nicely put it, professional athletes of the time generally thought there were ‘higher purposes that merely making or spending money’ (Citation2004, 131).
5. Of course, since the powers that be who regulate contemporary sport have outlawed the use of such performance-enhancing aids like these, the athletes who favor them, and who stand, not incidentally, to benefit the most from them in their particular chosen sports, are more than reluctant to express their views on this matter in public.
6. By including the intramural dispute between our present fractured athletic community, I want to underscore Rorty’s point that normative conflicts within a culture are not different in kind from those between different cultures (Citation1991, 26).
7. How far they can be stretched in this regard depends further on the normative aim we have in mind. I have been arguing that in the case of substantive partisan athletic disputes of the sort featured in the text, they can’t be stretched too thin since their normative clout in such cases rises or falls on the thickness of their moral terms. However, if the aim is, say, to show solidarity, to use Walzer’s example, with the marchers demonstrating for justice in Prague in 1989, we can easily thin out our thick normative vocabularies and figuratively join hands with them (Citation1994, 2). The reason why is that the normative commitments of the marchers were so ‘elementary’ that they could be expressed in any of the various normative language games available at that time – this is the same reason, by the way, I earlier claimed that Russell’s Mack example was elementary enough for adherents of different normative athletic communities to agree on both the diagnosis and the remedy.
8. Sport is hardly an exception in this regard, since, for instance, progressive liberals would similarly have a hard time taking seriously the views of, say, fundamentalist Christian theocrats.
9. His teammate, Lance Armstrong, similarly thought that high-performance sport legitimately included ‘the competition to be the person who made best use of the drugs’ (Runciman Citation2012, 4), Or as Armstrong himself inelegantly put it, when it comes to drugs in sport, which he rightly thought were prevalent in elite cycling, ‘Whatever you do, those other fuckers are doing more’ (quoted in Runciman, 4).