The Social Atmosphere of Sport (Day 24)

Walk - 2 miles, 35 minutes

Today doesn’t count at all. It shall forever be filed under ‘ambulatory loafing’ in a dark neglected corner of the library of exercise and never revisited.

Instead I want to talk about the social atmosphere of sport. This  article by Ed Smith would seem, from the headline, to be about the difficulty for gay sportsmen coming out, but it is actually more about the constraints of an overly macho dressing room culture. An interesting passage is:

A few years ago, I appeared in a Radio 3 debate called “Sport v the Arts”. It was a slightly silly premise, of course. But I did learn one uncomfortable truth that day. The panellists speaking against sport felt personally affronted and excluded by its aggressive and narrowly male tone. I argued that this noisy constituency was far from reflective of the whole of sport. But perhaps I would feel very differently if I hadn’t belonged to the sporting community from a very early age.
The case against sport, in fact, comes easily enough to me, too. I quickly weary of macho posturing, dislike voyeuristic hero worship and despise tribal hatreds. The case for sport is actually far subtler and harder to pin down. I am not convinced that sport builds character, though clearly some lives are rescued by the discipline and structure that it provides. Much more often, however, it merely builds the character of people who were already inclined towards self- improvement. Put differently, sport is often the accidental vehicle for personal growth: “character-building” opportunities could have come through music, or theatre, or any other form of communal activity.

It made me think about all that is good about road running. It truly is open to everybody and there is no need for anyone to feel excluded by an "aggressive, narrowly male tone". Everybody can join in, to the degree that makes them comfortable. You can join a club, or not; you can race, or not; you can form an informal social group, or not. In other words you can be as social or as individual as you want. But if you do reach out and talk to other runners you mostly find them supportive. However there is a proviso: most road runners are not competitive in the traditional  way. They are not being defined by their victories over others but by the victories against themselves. The aim is to do better and gradually improve or reach a particular goal. It is, as Ed Smith said,  just one of a number of routes to self improvement.

There is a big difference between a participative sport and high level, gladiatorial ,contests where sport is a mass spectacle. They are so different it is almost confusing for them to share the same name. Participative sport is about sharing the experience of doing something, elite sport is about a small number of people, doing something exceptionally well, being supported, encouraged, and identified with. It has a different kind of value.

Yet, with often flickering but never extinguished belief, I continue to think that sport does more good than harm. As a form of joyous collective memory and experience, it is a central thread of human identity. Beneath the adversarial veneer, sport is one of the ties that bind us together.

This is a justification of sport as a shared theatre and says nothing about what goes on behind the curtain and the forces that form the performance. It leaves the macho dressing room untouched as we concentrate on the drama

Jousting Boats and Sport

These are jousting boats.

I never knew such a sport existed, yet here it is in Cognac with a tournament of 8 boats and it is a very nice, relaxed affair. All the crews are having a great time, splashing about, winning some, losing others. There is a beer tent and a public address – so everything is as it should be.


The great thing about it is that it is fun and in the best sense it is amateur. You can see from the photo below that some of the rowing is, to say the least ragged. But somehow this is the whole point. And if it became too slick and professional it would probably become dull. As it is it is pure sport.


There are two types of sport. The first and the type that dominates far too much of the nations attention is professional sport, where the aim is absolute excellence. Everything that can be done to gain a victory is done and the sportsmen are identified from an early age, selected as being the best, then coached, trained, protected, and, mostly, paid extravagantly. These people are separate from us in so many ways, the only role we have is as spectator and supporter. We can look-on and applaud but don't know in our bones what it feels like to run so fast or hit a ball so well.

The second type of sport is truly amateur and is for everybody else. All of us who have other lives, other jobs, other responsibilities but who need to be physically active and participate in something despite not having any great talent. It is this sort of sport that is closest to my heart, and it allows me to call myself a runner. It is also helps you understand yourself better and gives you the perspective to recognise the distance between desires and achievements. It is good for your body and your mind.

Also, and this is most important, I reckon that most true sports are rooted somehow in the pub. I can imagine a bar session that had reached the stage of stupid ideas when someone said “ I bet we could joust with boats. They would then all join in and draw up the spec for the type of row boat, platform lance etc. until they had a silly but practicable plan. Well that's how I like to imagine it. (I would be really disappointed if the idea came out of a business meeting in the tourist office or from the PR department of one of the Cognac houses). It's also how I like to imagine the genesis of some of our odder running events. Surely you have to be a tiny bit tipsy to think that running between Birmingham and London, along the canal, is a good idea.

That's another characteristic of the second type of sport – it has elements of fantasy, imagination and fellowship. I don't see too much of those things in professional sport, it is all far too serious.