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Saturday 17 March '07 (from Grizedale Arts Blog)
Jesse stands forward to accommodate his neighbours salute
Glorious news about all the money in Britain going into the Olympics. I was a bit shocked by the Heritage Lottery officer when several months ago she declared with some delight that 50% of heritage funds were going into the Olympics. What I really don’t get is how the core precepts of sport, survival of the fittest, Nietzsche’s ‘over man’ concept so celebrated by the 3rd Reich -
fit with our apparent ambitions for a democratic, equality centred society.
The Berlin Olympics are treated (in the sports fraternity) as some sort of defeat of the Hitler’s ideals. That Jesse Owens - a man from a community of people that at the time were being unbelievably abused, lynched and generally butchered by white Southern America - with complete impunity - should single handedly become THE example of the wrongness of the National Socialist Party, is at best ironic at worst a spin too far.
In the arts, equality has long been a corner stone of public funding, the redressing of the balance between the strong and the weak THE agenda for the government and the arts one of the vehicles to promote that idea. Sport has always sat outside of that agenda with its celebration of the 'fittest' and its relative tolerance of abusive behavior.
When I was at school the theory behind sport was that it was a tool for children to learn about certain aspects of life, teamwork/pack mentality, aggression, competition, the dominance of the strong – all of these qualities have been discredited and sport for those reasons has been increasingly removed from the curriculum. Actually I think sport is ideal for children, these are it seems still the facts of life, and sport offers a very simplistic model from which to learn and question the basics. But sport is for children, it’s ‘games’, no self respecting adult should consider it as a career. To go from Sport as a means to understand life, to life as a means to understand sport is a upside down world - but then before I get too pompous you could make similar arguments about some areas of art, elitism and all that.
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1 Comment
I was never a competitive sports person, and was further put off by the head of PE who insisted all boys should play rugby because it was 'character building'. He didn't like my loaded retort of 'But what kind of character are you building?'
Dorian Moore, March 17, 2007 13:31