Plato’s concept of dikaiosune is also strikingly parallel to the athletic ideal of teamwork. In book IV of the Republic, he explicitly associates dikaiosune with the proper management of a community in every individual who recognises his particular worth and performs his proper task as part of an optimally functioning community.

Correspondingly, a basketball team functions best when its quick conniving members play guard and the taller slower members play centre. Plato believed that the group of naturally diverse talents who cooperatively perform their own tasks would achieve the harmony of function characteristic of justice, and thereby manifest excellence or arete.

Self-knowledge, discipline, courage and justice are four forms of human excellence explicitly associated with sport and implicitly associated with winning. The cultivation of these virtues is a legitimate and laudable objective in education. Therefore the role of sport – and winning – in education can be justified with reference to them. A key corollary to this thesis, however, is that winning in sports is only legitimately pursued in education to the extent that its pursuit cultivates these virtues. Schools subscribing to this philosophy may still hire and fire coaches based on their ability to win, but should only do so to the extent that such wins are manifestations of the virtues the coach is actually instilling in his or her athletes. By the same token, a coach who manages to instill winning virtues in athletes but fails to win in the analytic sense should be retained nonetheless. The criterion should not be immediate win/loss statistics, but rather the educational value students derive from their athletic pursuits.

Excessive focus on the analytical idea of winning threatens to undermine the cultivation of virtues that give athletics its educational value. This is because analytic wins can be gained by using techniques that bypass or even squelch the kind of virtues that give winning its value. The virtue of self-knowledge associated with a winner is eliminated when the athlete uses clandestine means such as steroids or EPO to artificially expand their personal limitations.

A user of performance-enhancing drugs shows no appreciation for value of learning about oneself and carefully crafting ones maximum performance, but rather it reveals a complete lack of discipline and a refusal to recognise natural capacities and limitations. Chemical short-cuts also reveal a lack of courage in the athlete – an unwillingness to meet challenges through hard work and dedication.

Furthermore an athlete who trains either to please others or to avoid their punishments is not displaying true dedication and clearly lacks the virtues associated with victory. Finally, attempts to thwart the justice of sport by gaining an unfair advantage or a developing a secret weapon are attempts to erode the very value of victory itself. If you’ve made sure that your victory is inevitable, ask yourself how it could possibly be a victory at all.

Some of those who acknowledge that the value of winning is intimately tied to the perception of virtues associated with it might still be content to settle for analytic win. After all, to the victor go the spoils whether winning virtues were manifest in the victory or not. Many athletes have retained the glory and riches associated with victory despite their use of unethical techniques or substances.

Indeed a good argument can be made that the goal for professional athletes is simply making money and the manifestation of virtues is not a relevant issue. Why shouldn’t educational institutions teach their athletes the professional skills that will bring financial reward in sports industry just as they teach their business students skills for pursuing profit? And why shouldn’t schools make their own profit in the bargain? Colleges and Universities are in business, too, it may be argued. But schools in their use of athletics for profit rather than education would amount to egregious exploitation of the very people they profess to serve.

The real goal of sport in education hasn’t changed in 2.500 years; it is the cultivation of arete, human excellence. To the extent that winning can be or is achieved in scholastic athletics exclusive or in spite of such excellence, it is not winning at all – at least not the sort of winning that made winning valuable in the first place. If athletes are to be students, coaches are to be teachers, and schools are to count sport as a legitimate part of the curriculum, they must ask themselves why (and when) the pursuit of victory is worthwhile. In examining the philosophical question “What is winning?” we learn that winning may be everything, but every victory is not necessarily winning. Once we recognise that the very reason we should value winning is for the virtues we associate with it, we must accept that winning analytically without manifesting the associated virtues is not winning at all – at least not the sort of winning scholastic athletic programs should strive for. Schools are in the business of educating their students and athletics can be an integral part of that mission – so long as they retain a considered perspective on sport, education, and the meaning of victory.

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The first two parts of this article were published on 1 and 8 December