Why Olympia matters for modern sport

Abstract

From the modern scientific perspective, Olympia is a ruin at the far end of a fading sense of history that represents little more than the origins from which sport has continuously evolved. Quantitative measurements show continued increases in human performance, equipment efficiency and funding. But some question this athletic evolution. We worry about qualitative issues, such as virtue, meaning and beauty. The source of this contrast is a difference in values: Olympic vs. Efficiency values. Such values establish an ethos in sporting communities that influences how we behave, explain and even conceptualize our activities. I argue from the perspectives of metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, ethics and politics, that Olympic Ethos is needed to balance out the modern Efficiency Ethos, which threatens to dehumanize sport.

Keywords:

• Efficiency ethos
• Olympic ethos
• virtue
• divinity
• humanism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the International Olympic Academy who graciously hosted me in the library and cafeteria during the research and writing of this address, as well as the organization of the conference. I would also like to thank Apostolos Kosmopoulos, whose bookstore is the intellectual beacon of Olympia town, for helping to put my heart and mind in the right place to write this speech. I also thank the American Academy in Rome and the National Endowment for the Humanities and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who supported much of the research upon which this paper is based. In addition, I wish to thank my senior colleagues, Warren P. Fraleigh and Drew Hyland prominent among them, who have encouraged, challenged, and respected my ideas throughout my career. Finally, I am indebted to J.S. Russell and Paul Gaffney, who provided insightful feedback essential to the revisions of this paper.

Notes

1. All quotes and stats about Yiannis Pitsiladis are taken from Longman (2016).

2. This is the flagship discovery of the phenomenologists, but the Stoics had already pointed it out in ancient times.

3. MacIntyre (1981), see for example, 177 where knowledge of a practice’s history is necessary for recognizing its internal goods.

4. There are, of course, exceptions to this: Hegel, for example, could be called ‘the great fuser,’ but a good chunk of continental philosophy makes the effort as well.

5. A recent scandal surrounding Brailsford suggests that his marginal gains philosophy may have strayed beyond legal technology into banned substances (Cary 2017).

6. For a philosophical analysis of ancient athletics as reenactment of heroes see Reid (2017).

7. As I have argued extensively elsewhere (Reid 2009).

8. For an overview of Pythagorean athletes’ success and the role of technology in it, see Robineau (2017). Evidence that Pythagoreans took a scientific approach is as simple as the story reported in Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, I.9.5 about Milo lifting a calf above his head every day until it grew into a bull.

9. The philosophical debate over how officials maintain fairness in cases where the rules are not clear is an important one. A good place to start is Russell (1999).

10. For the full argument, see Reid (2012a).

11. For a fuller discussion of sports aesthetics, see Reid (2012b, ch 6), and Mumford (2011).

12. For a full account of the origin of sport’s link with virtue, see Reid (2011, ch 1) ‘Athletic Heroes.’

13. See Reid (2011, ch 3) ‘Boxing with Tyrants.’

14. The ‘transitivity,’ if you will, of the virtues, is also insisted upon by MacIntyre. See After Virtue 189, and my analysis of the issue in Reid (2011, 128–131).

15. I have not here addressed the question of whether the Efficiency Ethos encourages doping because it is too big a question to address here. I will say, however, that the obsession with athletic performance characteristic of EE, and its tendency to set aside other more holistic values, might make doping more attractive because it will, fairly reliably, move those numbers people are so obsessed with.

16. It is noteworthy at the end of the Longman (2017) article that Pitsiladis tells the athlete Bekele ‘All you need to do is trust me 100%’.

17. Hesiod’s myth of the ‘Five Generations of Humankind’ is in Works and Days (V.106–201). The myth tells of our decline from a Golden age when gods and humans intermingled and were near-equals, through silver and bronze ages (yes, that’s where the modern Olympic medals come from) to the heroic age of Achilles and Odysseus, and finally to the Iron Age occupied by Hesiod himself. This general view of moral and physical decline (which contrasts starkly with our contemporary idea of history as constant progress), created a moral urgency to reconnect through virtue with the nobler generations of the past.

18. The games take place in Iliad book 21. See also my analysis in Reid (2011, ch 1).

19. Malcolm X qtd. in Haley (1999, 346).

20. Orwell’s statement is endorsed by, among others, art historian Nigel Spivey (2004).