Spoiling Sport

The Olympics and Brexit

In February 1988 a plasterer from Cheltenham launched himself down the ski jump at the Calgary Winter Olympic Games. He was wearing thick spectacles, which would mist up as he flew and render him almost blind, and six pairs of socks to make his borrowed boots fit. His jump looked as though the extra socks weighed a lot, and he landed 16 metres shorter than the man who came second-last. Yet the crowd received him as if he were a record breaker. His name was Michael Edwards, but he had already become known as something new.

“In England,” Eddie the Eagle said, “we don’t give a fig whether you win. It’s great if you do, but we appreciate those who don’t. The failures are the people who never get off their bums. Anyone who has a go is a success.”

How times have changed. In February of this year the national governing body British Ski and Snowboard stated that Great Britain hoped to become one of the top five snow sports nations by 2030, with two new sources of funding having been set up. Funding for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, meanwhile, has been doubled to £27.9m.

Evidence from the summer games suggests this approach is likely to work. For Sydney 2000, the National Lottery and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport provided £58.9m, and Britain won twenty-eight medals. For Rio 2016 the amount was £274.5m, and the haul sixty-seven. If you plot money spent against medals won for all the Olympics since funding started, you get pretty much a straight line.

For the Winter Olympics, though, this starts to feel slightly odd. Snow – proper snow you could ski on – tends to plunge poor old Britain into chaos. Roads, trains, airports and schools all cease to function, and this is a small, accepted facet of national life. It simply does not snow often or hard enough to make inoculating ourselves against the stuff economically worthwhile, and we remain, like Eddie the Eagle, a laughing stock in terms of how we deal with it. So what does this decision to become very, very good at snow sports really mean?

At first glance, it might seem inspiring. If Britain, which has an average of fifteen days of settling snow each year and very few suitable mountains, can do this, then surely it can do anything. Except does it really mean that? A 2015 study by Boston Consulting Group suggested that nations’ success can be evaluated through ten metrics: GDP per capita, economic stability, employment, health, education, infrastructure, income equality, civil society, governance and the environment. Beating other countries at sport does not get mentioned. It might be fileable under “health”, but at least in the case of Olympic sport in Britain, that is not clear-cut. Sport England reported in 2016 that the number of people who exercise or play sport at least once a week had declined by 0.4 per cent since 2012 – the year the Olympics came to London at a cost of £9 billion pounds. Perhaps participation would have fallen more had Britain not done so well, but the London Games’ pledge to “inspire a generation” certainly doesn’t seem to have come true.

This stops being surprising when we remember that British Olympic policy has never really been about sporting participation or national health. Money is given to sports that are likely to win medals, so the modern pentathlon – which requires a sword, a gun and a horse, per person – had £6.9m for Rio, while basketball, which large numbers of people could play at minimal cost but at which Britain was never going to beat the US, got nothing. For Tokyo 2020, rowing and sailing (requiring costly equipment and proximity to the right sort of water) have £58m between them; badminton has had all of its £5.7m taken away. Boxing is accessible, and well taken care of at a steady £14.7m, but its long-term health benefits are questionable. It did indeed feel like a bad punchline when Sport England reported that the biggest decline since 2012 was “among people from ethnic minorities and economically deprived groups”. In their Active People Survey, the proportion of non-white respondents engaging in weekly physical activity between 2012 and 2016 fell by 1.5%. The fall for white people was 0.1%. For the upper socioeconomic half it was 0.6%, and for the lower 2.9%. The only socioeconomic group whose physical activity went up was full-time students, and in spite of Britain’s Paralympic success, activity among people with disabilities fell by over ten times more than that of those without. Creating charities to subsidise skiing seems unlikely to turn this around.

In ancient times of course, Olympic sport was more relevant. The historian Donald Kyle wrote that “Victories at Olympia…were parapolitical devices in foreign relations”. Greek city states tended to decide things via hand-to-hand combat, so sending athletes to compete was legitimate diplomacy. Yet nobody is about to give Britain a better trade deal because it did so well at Rio. Could a sense of hubris over Britain’s sporting success even have had a small effect on the country’s decision to quit the EU, along with its more recent bullishness in pursuing a “hard” Brexit?

I used to coach one of Britain’s most successful sports – rowing – as a hobby and then as a job, after spending my younger years as a cox. I loved the iterative physicality of it – closing in on the perfect stroke – and the proximity to nature too. A good crew no longer feels like athletes in a boat, but a living gestalt of muscle and carbon-fibre, and the beauty of the river changes season by season, and day by day. London rowers live amid the Tideway’s breath – four hours in, eight hours out – and all share the basic human exaltation in simply being afloat. I saw seven herons in the same tree once.

And then there is the winning. Unlike in other racing sports where one faces forwards, when leading at rowing you can see your opposition and they can’t see you. Advantage accrues to advantage, so getting in front becomes more brutal. Watching my crews win was incredible. Yet when my previous contract ended in 2013 I went cold turkey – left the sport behind and didn’t go back.

3 The Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), asked, “Why do the masses of people allow themselves to be politically swindled?” In other words, why, in hard times, do people without much not vote for the Left, who explicitly want to make them better off, but for the Right, whose interests tend to be more aligned with the rich and powerful? Reich believes the answer is freedom, which we simultaneously long for and greatly fear. Repressive movements always promise freedom from something or other, he notes, and the promise is made by a strong, charismatic leader. This appeals to the child in us, who wants to grow up and be independent but still retain the safety of parents. In real life, of course, this is not possible, but fascism pretends that it is.

Reich believed religion to be one of several “authoritarian structures” that support fascistic beliefs: there is, after all, a father-figure in a starring role, and the promise of freedom after death. “The function of mysticism”, he wrote, “is to divert attention away from daily misery and prevent a revolt against the real causes of that misery.”

Diverting attention from daily misery? I couldn’t help but be reminded of Reich as I watched “us” win all those medals in Rio so shortly after the real, electorate “we” had voted to leave the European Union. Sporting success to me felt like an opiate to relieve the pain of Brexit. For some who voted to leave, it probably felt like vindication. For both sides, of course, the sport was irrelevant to the political decision.

4 Writing in the Telegraph after the Rio Olympics, the journalist Jeremy Warner proudly declared British success to have been “another triumph for the application of right-wing thinking . . . Winners are backed, losers are left behind”. Darwin’s ghost put in its inevitable appearance and we were reminded of how the strongest sports were given more money, and went on to become stronger still.

I was discomfited by Warner’s piece, in part because it made me reflect on my time as a coach. I used to run a girls’ squad at a school in West London and had the senior athletes train through the winter in single sculls. If an athlete beat someone ranked above her in the weekly time trial, then she had a right to the losing girl’s assigned boat, which was often of better quality. This was of course social Darwinist thinking in its purest form – if you were stronger than somebody else then you got to take her stuff – and what Warner hailed for whole-sport funding worked for those junior scullers as well. When my top crew graduated, they had not let another school past them in side-by-side racing for over a year. Rewarding them for doing violence was effective training.

At the time I didn’t think that I was walking away from sport – giving up on seeing the seven herons again – because it was too neo-liberal. All I felt was that I was tired. One inevitably loses more often than one wins, and even winning doesn’t make the next race wait. And while competing is not all about the winning – even the “losers” are elevated by having tried – what values are they being elevated in? What, to put it another way, are the attributes of people who are good at sport?

Physical strength, fitness and mental toughness are probably the biggest three in rowing, with discipline and coordination on the podium’s lower steps. Controlled aggression is important, and so is the ability to endure pain, and in a non-contact sense to dish it out. All sports require deference to authority, and an ability to follow the rules, along with a desire to dominate opponents. If we cut away the trellising of sport, what are we left with? What sort of a person have we grown, and what sort of a society are they suited for?

Note that even sport’s softer or more ascetic virtues – self-sacrifice, steadiness, the forgoing of individual pleasure for team spirit – feel as if they’d be at home in the kinds of religion Reich claims “help the few control the labour of the many”. Team spirit may be no bad thing, whether sporting or religious, but children divided into teams do readily assimilate the difference between reds and blues, shirts and skins, us and them.

There is a lexical echo to all this in wider society: the word “spoilsport” – that insult, connoting spite and dreariness – is regularly hurled at feminists, environmental activists, health-and-safety enthusiasts and anyone in favour of calling minority groups by the names they would wish. To challenge the status quo or question the rules of the authoritarian game is to be marked out as a bore.

5 Sport, though, does have one heavyweight liberal virtue in its corner. Life isn’t fair, we frequently hear, and the reason we tolerate the Olympics – the expense, slum-clearing and construction deaths; the security, pariah-hosts and dubious legacies – is that if we could only stamp out the doping, they are.

If only doping were easy to stamp out. But as Marc Perelman argued in his book Barbaric Sport (2012) “the very logic of competitive sport pushes it permanently towards doping”, and if we expand the idea to include the dubious gaining of advantages in general, then the whole edifice of Olympic fairness starts to look shaky. The competitive zeal that international competition can arouse all too often drives its participants towards ever more extreme attempts to gain the upper hand.

George Orwell understood well the extent to which our tribal impulses can overwhelm us, if necessary at the expense of fairness. In “The Sporting Spirit” published in Tribune in 1945, he wrote:

On the village green, where you pick sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and exercise: but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage combative instincts are aroused.

I know what he means. A few years ago I sprayed the hull of my crew’s boat with a hydrophobic coating, normally used to reduce fuel consumption in motor vessels, and at the time banned from international rowing. It was not banned from the national event we were doing, though, and I used it and we won. This was morally questionable, but my conscience is clear. I may have been outside the spirit of fairness, but I remained fully within the superordinate spirit of competition. For all I knew other coaches were doing the same thing, and I wouldn’t have minded if they had been.

And I sprayed that boat for the glory of a co-educational public school in Hammersmith, and my own prestige within a fairly small community. When the glory of nations is claimed as the stake, and the prestige is global, elite sportspeople and their coaches will push the boundaries even harder. British Cycling employed aerodynamic engineers to add “marginal gains” to their bikes, and all funded athletes have an advantage over those who have to work. This is within the rules of course, but it is difficult to think of it as fair. It’s easy to imbibe sports’s credo that success equals talent plus hard work, but rather inconveniently, just as in the rest of life, it seems to depend on place of birth and money as well.

Of course “fiscal doping” is not the same as actual doping, but even there the lines are blurred. Triamcinolone is a banned, performance-enhancing corticosteroid, which David Millar described as the “most potent” he had used, but if Bradley Wiggins had a valid Therapeutic Use Exemption for it then he is not a cheat. Maria Sharapova took a performance-enhancing drug that she was allowed (meldonium) which was then reclassified as one she wasn’t, and that means she is. While an absolute interpretation of this might be comforting (“rules are rules!”) what happened was that Sharapova’s medical team got it wrong and Wiggins’s got it right, but both were simply doing their jobs. When best performance is the goal and the stakes are very high, then the rational thing to do is to take any performance-enhancing substance that one can within the rules. And it isn’t hard to see how even deliberate rule-breaking could feel like merely levelling the playing field, when what is permitted so clearly favours the rich. They have those bikes, why shouldn’t we have this supplement? It feels uncomfortably as though Perelman might be right, and that doping, far from being a parasite on the body of sport, is in fact its logical consequence.

6 Of course the truest difference between fiscal and actual doping is health – banned drugs are generally bad for you in a way that skinny handlebars are not. But how healthy is it to begin gymnastics training at six years old, or go rowing three times a day? Triple Olympic champion oarsman Andrew Triggs-Hodge thinks not very. Interviewed in the Telegraph he mused, “I wonder how much I have shortened my life by”. He has an enlarged heart prone to arrhythmia, and his two lower vertebrae will probably at some point have to be fused. “The training we do is probably as dumb for your body as smoking”, he says. “It’s like an F1 car which is built to do a few hundred miles.” Triggs-Hodge concludes that for him it was worth it, but he has three Olympic golds. What of all those athletes who worked as hard as him but left with nothing?

Plus it doesn’t seem just to be physical wellbeing that suffers. Rowing Australia has recently centralized its men’s and women’s programmes, meaning all female rowers must relocate to Sydney and all male ones to Canberra. The double Olympic medallist Karsten Forsterling said this institutionalized a “master-slave relationship” and, according to an article in The Australian, “left the athletes with no voice and compromised their welfare”. Rowing Australia chairman Rob Scott countered, essentially, that centralization was necessary or they’d never again beat the (centrally trained) Poms. The point is that both men are correct – Forsterling in terms of what is best for people, and Scott in terms of what is best for sport. In Chris Cleave’s novel Gold (2012), a coach complains of a cyclist, “She’s the sort of girl who’d stop training if her dad died”. A recently leaked report on the culture of “fear and bullying” in British Cycling suggests that plundering fiction for lines like this may soon be unnecessary.

Shortly after returning from Calgary, Eddie the Eagle released a song:

The East Germans got angry,
They said I was a clown,
But all they want is winning,
And they do it with a frown.

Has Britain turned into its Olympic tormentors of the 1980s?

7 When asked what had made him proudest in his commentary career, the cricketer Richie Benaud looked thoughtful. Then he replied, “I never once said ‘we’. I always said ‘Australia’”. British Olympic pundits jettisoned impartiality years ago. If professional observers struggle in this way, what chance do the rest of us have?

What “we” – Britain – do have is the highest obesity rate in western Europe. We watch Jessica Ennis-Hill compete, and she is meant to inspire us to become more active, but the more that we identify with “Team GB” then the more Ennis-Hill is us and we are her. “We” are already in fantastic shape; we don’t need to get off the couch and do anything.

But of course we are not Jessica Ennis-Hill. We are not her glutes or Mo Farah’s smile, Chris Hoy’s legs or Matthew Pinsent’s lungs. We are not the aerobatic sorcery of Max Whitlock or the all-erasing final triumph of Katherine Grainger. We are ordinary. We are everyday. And if we keep swallowing the sweet, pacifying medicine we are being fed – the medals, flags, anthems and parades – then we are not only consuming jingoistic ideology that has painstakingly been flavoured as neutral, but celebrating triumphs that are ersatz and meaningless, instead of striving for personal betterment that is real. The Olympics are an ancient rite made modern, yet we still being appeased by bread and circuses.

I can only hope the question of why Britain is aiming to become a leading snow-sports nation has not been deeply considered and has no proper answer. Because if it has been, and there is one, then that is frightening.

8 I received an email from an old friend last week, asking me to take a look at the crew she coaches at a local club. Just one session, she said, just a bit of fun. I still don’t know if I am going to do it. In Trainspotting 2 they all looked so old.

And more than that, in the version of humanity that lasts the longest – the improbable one, where we don’t annihilate ourselves with war, famine, pestilence, or pollution – I can’t help but wonder whether international sport will be something only in history books: a curiosity from a darker age.

Authoritarianism is a fractal. As it is with countries, so it is with individuals, and friendly local rowing clubs requesting assistance too. And yet I would so love to see those seven herons again. They were around the back of Brentford Ait, at the far end from Kew Road Bridge. It was approximately 6am when I saw them.

TLS Online, April 2017