As in the world of the Ancient Greeks, sport plays an important role in educational institutions. The reasoning for this in ancient times, as now, is a belief that sport helps to make better people – that it promotes excellence (what the Greeks called arete) in individuals, excellence which can be applied to almost any endeavour in life.

That said, it must be acknowledged that most athletes, coaches, and school administrations identify the goal of their athletic programmes in one word: winning. Is this a sign that we’ve lost touch with the age-old rationale for including sport in education? Is the philosophy that “winning is everything”, or “the only thing”,(1) or maybe the Platonic ideal of the Good as manifested in sport at odds with the fundamental objectives of education? The best way to tell is to ask a simple yet crucial question in the style of Socrates: What is winning?

One reason this question is seldom asked may be that, on the face of it, the answer is absurdly obvious. Sports, after all, are essentially sets of rules constructed by human beings, and winning is clearly defined within each of these sets of rules. Analytically, a winner is simply the athlete or team who accumulates the most points, crosses the finish line first, jumps the highest, throws the farthest, or whatever superlative the sport designates.

The definition of winning in sport is clear and quantitatively measurable – unlike “winning” in other areas of life, such as love or happiness, where success is not so easily measured. Perhaps this precision is one of the reasons we value an athletic victor so much, but certainly there is more to it.

Ben Johnson crossed the finish line first in the 100-metre dash at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, but few consider him the winner of the race. Even victors who win “fair and square” sometimes see the “moral victory” and the lion’s share of admiration awarded to a losing competitor. Our conception of a winner runs much deeper than the ability to fulfil the analytic definition of victory in sport.

When Athena chose Odysseus to be an athletic victor, she did so because she loved his character – he had arete (virtue), and so deserved to win the race. We still frequently associate athletic victory with traditional virtues. This explains why we push our children to admire and even emulate athletic heroes like Michael Jordan. It also explains why a national uproar is created when a player spits on an umpire or is convicted of drunk driving – offences that would be all but overlooked if committed by unknown businessmen. But more fundamentally, the association of virtue and victory explains why we should view sport as a proper part of education.

The very concepts of moral victory, personal victory, and even being “robbed of victory” show that we view winning as much than scoring the most points or crossing the line first. We view winning as the manifestation of certain virtues inherent in the athlete in a given performance. This is confirmed by the fact that when those virtues are manifested by an athlete or team in an analytic loss, we describe the performance in terms of victory nonetheless; it is a moral victory, a personal victory, or some such qualified win. Likewise, when an analytic win is achieved without the accompanying manifestation of virtue, we try to disassociate the performance with victory by calling it a “tainted win” or a “win-on-paper”.

If the essence of winning and the role of sport in education both depend for their justification on the virtues associated with them, it is important to articulate what those virtues are. In his Socratic dialogues, Plato identified the particular virtues associated with arete to be piety, temperance, courage, and justice (2) There is good reason to believe that the religious rituals associated with sport derive from its origin in religious sacrifices (3), but Plato’s notion of piety endures in our notion of an athlete’s virtue on another less explicitly religious level as self-knowledge.

Notes

1) Both of these popular sayings are derived by football coach Vince Lombardi, who later modified his statement to: “Winning isn’t everything – but making the effort to win is”. See Walton (1992), p. xi.

2) The dialogues dealing specifically with these parts of virtue are: Euthyphro, Charmides, Laches and Republic, respectively. Virtue is the central topic of nearly all the Socratic works, however.

3) For a Fascinating account of this, see David Sansone’s Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport (1988).

This is the first of a three-part article. The other two parts will be published on 8 and 15 December.

Pippo Psaila is a Nationalist Party candidate.