Winning and losing, and how sport gives the lie to ‘equality’
by Gavin Ashenden:
“’Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”.
For Tennyson, who wrote this in his poem In Memoriam, longing and loving is what makes us truly human. There have been different kinds of longing this summer. Longing for England to win the World Cup again and bring it home. Longing for our heroes to triumph in tennis and cricket.
The longing for the love Tennyson was writing about included romance, the plighting of our troth to another, the fragile fear of finding and placing faith in another person’s heart; but extended much further, even to the longing of a caged bird for its freedom.
And sport teaches us about longing and loving too. This has been a summer with some wonderful sport. Russia and Wimbledon of course; but also France with the exquisite flock of cycles flowing like a muscular river of hope through its dusty hills, valleys and villages.
Sport teaches us a lot about being human. It presents us with the struggles of life in a small microcosm of 90 minutes or in the best of cricket, stretched out to 5 days. The struggle of our whole lives are compressed into a match or a tournament.
Sport gives us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a struggle that will certainly leave us gutted if we lose, but not at least wrecked and wounded for years or decades as some other disappointments do; and it fills us with joy, jubilation and ecstasy in the moment, if we win.
Everything may come down to depending on one toss of the ball; one moment of concentration; one confrontation with the fear of losing in order to win everything. Fear paralyses just as much in sport as it does in life, and steals what might be most precious and what we might most need.
Like all exquisite struggle, the moneymen and moneywomen often try to corrupt and tame sport, to dilute it more prosaically into diversion and entertainment, a temporary distraction.
Instinctively we know it needs to be more than that. It’s about souls as well as about seconds of diversion. And maybe like life, that the choice we get presented with in sport too. Do we settle for being simply entertained and diverted, or do we dare look for something more noble?
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