ATHLETIC SPORTS

The fatal orientation

In France, we are witnessing a remarkable phenomenon: as the taste for sports practices develops, the sporting spirit is dying.

This sporting spirit that once animated us, at the time when we paid for everything out of our own pockets and when we went, on Sunday mornings, to plant the football posts ourselves in a distant and rough meadow.
Today, we are completely mistaken about the true purpose of sport. Or rather, we do not want to take the time to reflect on the real scope of sports exercises.
Distraction, hygiene, health, all that nonsense!

Two motives inspire nine-tenths of today's practitioners: hamming it up and the spirit of lucre. Hence these two cankers of contemporary sport: Championitis and Professionalism.

In the past, the students of Rabelais, Montaigne, and Rousseau practiced strength and agility exercises to keep their muscles and breathing in shape.
Today, as soon as a kid is old enough to wear a pair of spiked shoes or cleated boots, he runs to train at the stadium with the undisguised hope of becoming a champion as quickly as possible.
He is eager to show off embossed zinc trinkets, to show off his curves under a sweater adorned with a crest, or even the Gallic rooster, to make the sloppy-nosed kids, the fans with round bellies, the hens with eyes that are too dark and lips that are too red, and the very twentieth-century half-virgins gape in admiration...
The "child of the century" contemporary with Musset has given way to the handsome guy who makes torso and biceps effects. We are no longer dreamers; we are a record holder of something!...

Opposed, but equally ridiculous conceptions of the state of a man... Our mania for championships and hamming it up leads us straight to premature and exaggerated specialization that places sport on the same level as acrobatics (and even then!...) and that creates inharmonious individuals in the unequal development of their muscle groups.

Next to the ham, the professional.
He places interest above vanity. His muscles and his chest are a capital that he intends to commercialize, in order to put butter in the spinach and the spinach in silverware.
And, slyly, slowly, but implacably, the octopus-professionalism devours what remains of sportsmanship in the current generation.
And too many leaders, through carelessness or lack of energy, let themselves be guided by the herd that they should keep on the right path.
Sport turns into a spectacle. And the spectacle, if it has the face of sport, does not possess it. the soul...
Yes, Championitis and Professionalism, hamming it up and the spirit of lucre; these are the assassins of the sporting spirit, as we understood it a quarter of a century ago...

The remedies?...
There is a whole immense work of sports education to be taken up from the base. A vast and complicated problem, but whose solution would be so fruitful that it is worth focusing on. It is the task of the last dyed-in-the-wool sportsmen, of the special press, of enlightened leaders. It would be, if it deigned to take an interest in it, the profoundly moralizing work of the University...

G. Milet.