Sportspeople: Bad Examples

Jessica Ennis - just selfish?

With the recent announcement of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist, the press will no doubt be raking over the Olympic rhetoric about achievement and role models. Athletes like Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah and Bradley Wiggins have been hailed as excellent new examples for the nation's children to sweep away the dross of reality stars and rappers. On the face of it, that seems like a good idea. We can replace talentless big brother contestants and misogynistic performers with clean-living, dedicated athletes, focused on pushing the boundaries of human achievement. I’m going to swim (ineptly) against the tide and suggest a few reasons why sportspeople aren’t worth idolising.

ELITISM

All sport is elitist by its very nature. Elite sport is especially elitist. Controversial, I know, but I'm saying it anyway. Surprisingly - as this is one of the least socially mobile developed countries in the world - this isn't a social issue: even the rowing and equestrian teams showed an encouraging diversity of background. This is about physical elitism: an intrinsic quality of professional sport where the point is to establish which competitor is physically superior to the others. Should our children be inspired by a system where only one person can be successful, and that success is heavily dependent on genetics? It’s hardly a good model for society.

The problem with elitism goes further.  From World Champions right down to sports day champions, that status is only achieved by excluding others. Sporting success isn't an appropriate thing for a large number of people to aspire to unless those people are going to be happy with losing. Can we expect that, given how much of our appreciation of these athletes is based on their unwillingness to accept defeat? So maybe people could just be inspired to take part in sport? In that case, why idolise champions and not just your mate who plays Sunday league football?

BODIES

I wonder why there is so much uproar about advertising showing models with bodies unobtainable by most of us, while athletes who fall into an even smaller corporeal niche are celebrated as role models. The message of the anti-size-zero lobby is that our fashion role models should have obtainable bodies; an understandable criterion. Generally this just isn’t the case with athletes; it's more realistic for an average teenage girl to get the body of a model than a world-class heptathlete. Athletes are admired for their dedication and self-denial when it comes to diet as well as exercise; isn’t that just the same quality so denigrated in stick-thin catwalk models? Well at least, you might say, for athletes there’s a better reason for exercising restraint: which brings me on to:

POINTLESSNESS AND MORALITY

I think that two basic criteria for a role model are that she should be doing something good and for the right reasons.

A lot is said about amirability of achievement in sport, particularly about record breakers like Usain Bolt, those overcoming adversity like Ellie Simmonds and endurance athletes like Bradley Wiggins. However it strikes me that these athletes, for all their striving, aren’t helping anyone. Sportspeople are profoundly, almost uniquely amongst all the roles in society, not contributing any good. Bankers, tax collectors and politicians all serve in roles that improve society by providing something that people want or need; athletes provide no direct benefit to anyone but themselves. You might say that they provide entertainment but firstly, that’s only tangential and certainly not the focus of their efforts and secondly much more entertainment is provided by footballers (judged worse role models) than rowers (judged better role models) who are only on television briefly every four years.

Elite sport’s pointlessness is well illustrated by its arbitrariness. Usain Bolt is hailed world-wide as a hero and role model for breaking the 100m record, while James Roumeliotis of Boston, USA holds the world record for consecutive pogo jumps and you’ve not heard of him. James raised over $10,000 for a Scleroderma charity with his record attempt; I don’t have a link to Usain’s justgiving page for the 2012 Olympics.

So what athletes do isn't productive; doesn't that make them more noble for having purer aims? Let’s compare the motivation of a runner to, say, a rapper. The runner’s motivation when he goes out training is either to run faster (socially useless) or to beat his opponents (selfish) whereas the rapper’s motivation when she’s practising could be to do something creative (socially useful) or to entertain (altruistic). The rapper might be doing it just for the money and fame so there’s a chance she’s solely motivated by greed, but the athlete must be selfish as there’s no-one else who can benefit from his achievements. I think that dedication is an admirable quality but it loses all of its impressiveness when directed solely towards self-aggrandisement.

In conclusion, I think that replacing reality TV stars with athletes is progress. We’re replacing bad role models with bland ones. But surely we should aspire to something better?

Declarations:

1. I don't watch sport. Could you guess?

2. This reads like it's born of resentment at sporting failure. I have national medals in two sports.

3. My vote for SPOTY: Katherine Grainger. What a trooper!

Diversion: "Putting a downer on public celebrations of tremendous achievement since 2012"