I Hate Sport

In a recent electrical conversation with a friend, the fact that it was once possible for an Olympic athlete to be accused of 'training' came up.

I've been sporty for most of my adult life, and I know exactly what those guys in the 1920s were complaining about.

The game-theoretic structure of sport is wrong.

The point of sport is to have something fun and friendly to do at the weekend. All our sports are children's games that it turns out adults can enjoy too.

If you don't enjoy it, why would you even call it sport?

What you want out of sport is the joy of the game itself, the relationships that you make out of it, the atavistic thrill of combat without the ocean of blood, the wonderful feeling of practising something and getting better at it, the team spirit, the feeling of good health and freedom that comes from having some sort of physical activity in your life.

The reasons for enjoying and approving of sport are many. It was a great invention, when the first adults decided to play children's games in their new-found spare time.

There are two problems.

One is that it's possible to care about winning far too much. This is something in our evolved psychology whose origin is too obvious to mention.

The sport I've taken most seriously in my life has been rowing.

Not one competition I have ever entered has mattered in the grand scheme of things, and I have never thought it did. But when actually in a boat race, of any standard or against any rival, I would happily damage my own health in order to win. I often threw up at the end of hard races.

The day when I found myself, in the middle of a race at Peterborough Regatta whose result is nowhere recorded, and which went entirely unnoticed even by the spectators on the day, not caring insanely much about beating the boatful of complete strangers rowing next to us, and thinking that it might be nice to back off a bit and let the intense pain in my legs die down, was the day I gave up rowing for good.

Once, during the Head of the River Race, which is the big event for British men's rowing in the winter, rowed over the university boat race course on the Thames, with cheering crowds and the best boat of every club in England racing for results that are remembered for years, I misjudged my own strength, overdid it, and found myself 10 minutes into the race with my vision contracting to a tunnel, as the cells in my eyes and my brain starved for oxygen, until it felt as though I was looking at the back of the person in front of me through a telescope. I rowed the rest of the course in delirium.

Rowing is a technical sport. That kind of exhaustion is not going to do your technique any good at all, and you aren't going to produce significantly more power by putting yourself into that kind of place. It's beyond doubt counterproductive to race that hard.

To put this crazed over-exertion into perspective, this was early in my rowing career. I was rowing in my club's second VIII. We were very bad, and had no business being in the HORR at all. I honestly can't remember what administrative cock-up had resulted in our invitation. I think we came third from bottom out of four hundred boats.

And we knew this perfectly well before the start of the race. One of my favourite memories is of our utterly unrealistic captain giving his pre-race pep-talk. He said "We're going to go out there and own this river. We can be the fastest thing out there. We just have to believe." As he said this, the German national squad rowed past behind him on its way to the start.

I mentioned my tunnel vision to a friend of mine who rowed for the Cambridge University Lightweights.

He said "That's nothing. Every time I do an ergo I go blind." He was perfectly serious.

Have you any idea who won the lightweights race this year, or even when or where it was held? I haven't, and I coach rowing in Cambridge.

The second problem is that, although practising your sport can be great fun, there are lots of ways to get better at a sport that aren't a great deal of fun.

For instance, there's a sort of 'rowing simulator', called an ergometer, invented by Canadians whose rivers froze over in the winter, and who wanted a way to practise rowing without needing water.

It is almost never a good idea, from the point of view of the eventual speed of your boat, to do an ergo instead of going rowing.

The only real case for it would be if you were trying to explore your personal limits and get used to the various sensations that a beginner feels as pain, but an experienced rower feels as information.

But it can be difficult to organise rowing outings. In an VIII, you need all nine of your people to be available at the same time. And you need the river to be nice and clear of other traffic so that you can do your hard work out on the water.

So sometimes, it can be more organizationally feasible for a committed crew to organize say, five outings a week, and add another five ergo sessions on top of that.

I am talking about half-decent club athletes. Training close to the physical limits that the human body can tolerate. Many of them will be injured by the weight of training and drop out, for the season or for good.

And it doesn't make a great deal of difference in the end. What, without the ergometers and the hard training, would be a competition won by naturally fit people with good genes who practised enough to get technically good and decently fit, becomes a competition won by naturally fit people with good genes who practise enough to become technically good, and can also, by virtue of their good genes, tolerate insane training loads, and who have the obsessive personalities necessary to do this sort of thing in order to win.

But notice what has happened, once people have substituted 'training to win' for 'practising because it is enjoyable'.

Anyone who just does as much as a man would do for fun is 'hopeless', an 'underachiever', a 'tourist', 'lazy', 'rubbish', 'a joke'. Largely despised by the community around his sport.

Anyone else is doing at least something that he would rather not do. And anyone who would like to win a race some day is doing a very great deal of stuff that he would rather not be doing.

I'm still talking about amateur sport, someone's recreation. Once you start getting paid professional sportsmen, who may quite literally loathe their profession but have no other source of income, and a self-image built up around being good at their sport, and once you start getting sport as a business, cynically whipping up tribal hatreds in order to extract money from 'fans' who have nothing at all in common with the highest bidder mercenary players in the teams that they are supporting, the whole thing becomes profoundly distasteful.

I have been sporty all my adult life, and I hate sport.

Not the sort of thing that goes on between consenting adults on village cricket greens every weekend, which is largely friendly, enjoyable, and life enhancing, or the cheerful rivalry between Oxbridge college boat clubs, that provides a happy distraction from the stresses of undergraduate life.

But the high levels of sport, where the sport becomes the life, which are peopled by obsessive, selfish, nasty cheats. A number of whom have good PR.

This is the sort of thing that the amateur movement was trying to prevent. They had seen it all before in the nineteenth century, with its professional athletes and its betting rings and its corruption and its cheating and its match fixing, and they wanted none of it.

And for a while they had the upper hand, and 'sporting' somehow became a synonym for 'decent'.

But the game theoretic structure of sport is wrong, and it does not permit amateurism.

Once people can train, rather than practise, those who train will win.

Once people can make money from winning, they don't need to work, and so they can train a lot.

Once they can train a lot, they're doing something that they don't enjoy.

And if you're not enjoying it, there's no point to it at all.