How can we not be filled with admiration and enthusiasm at the sporting prowess of the Olympic Games? The whole world rightly admires, applauds, congratulates, trembles, cries, rages, vibrates thanks to the high-level athletes. Nothing seems to bring people together more, to move as much, to please more than sport, while it no longer coincides in any way with current ideologies. Never has the heroism of sport been so at odds with the right-thinking opinions of the moment.
Everything in sport is discipline, rigor, work, effort. Terms and realities that the sacrosanct progressivism judges rancid and rejects continuously in favor of leisure, fun, cool. The gamification and the “distractionist” system have invaded learning and the world of training. Sport is also about the long term, about progress over time. You only have to listen to athletes describe their laborious preparation over years to no longer believe in the jokes and tricks of personal development shopkeepers offering quick behavioral recipes, whose book titles alone are telling and misleading: confidence in five lessons, surpassing oneself in a few weeks, success within reach. Sport illustrates the complete opposite. Nothing is more hierarchical than a podium, more distinctive than a medal, more selective than a stopwatch!
The merciless skimming that is a sports competition makes it difficult to hear the pastorals of complete egalitarianism that the apostles of Good preach without respite, by confusing equality of rights (we are all equal) and equivalence of skills (we are all equal). Sport, however, knows how to make the difference. The merchants of well-being must find themselves very vague in the face of suffering, pain, accidents, fractures, fear, stress and all the malaise that high-level sport necessarily engenders. Will they still dare to sell that performance comes from well-being? Sport proves the opposite! It is not because athletes are happy that they perform, but rather because they win and perform that they cry with joy. As for the sweet refrains about benevolence and empathy that the knights of Good shower on us, they seem far removed from the fierce competitive spirit and unwavering will to defeat the opponent that inhabits every athlete we cheer on.
Sport resists the holy empire of undifferentiation
The evangelists of post-truth, maintaining with a satisfied face that there is not just one truth, but several, and that everything is relative, must also change their faces in the face of the unanimity of a sports verdict brutally putting an end to all relativism. Because a single and unique fierce truth governs sport (and should govern schools, but also businesses): that of merit.
In the name of the virtuous injunction to put an end to differences, hierarchies fade, differences become suspect, distinctions are erased. However, all these undifferentiating ambitions do not fit well with those of competitors whose objective is precisely to make a difference. Only the gap makes the winner. Only the difference makes the distinction that each nation expects behind its athlete. If there are still champions that we admire, beings that we consider extraordinary, it is because sport resists the holy empire of undifferentiation. Finally, sport does not deny combat, does not fear the challenge, does not thwart confrontation, all these harsh realities that it is good form to avoid in the candy pink cotton wool of the consensual “no waves”.
The dark irony of the Olympics is that sport has achieved the quasi-Olympic feat of being unanimously praised by political correctness, even though it opposes it in every way. It is fashionable to praise its values, even though they are a complete reversal of the spirit of the times, a snub to political correctness, a defiance of naivety, and a coup de force against good feelings. Let us hope that the end of the Olympics does not mark the end of the spirit of sport, which remains a big “no” to political correctness, and probably the best of philosophies.
Julia de Funès has a doctorate in philosophy
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