became the personification of evil in sport in 2015, while achieving unprecedented success on the track, one thing he left in his wake was the spirit of sport. Some people complained that it was still there—with Gatlin performing remarkable athletic feats—but that it was being obscured, even suffocated, by rules and regulations. But the urge to define the spirit of sport as something apart from the rules of competition fails to recognize that sport is made possible by rules. The spirit of sport is not obscured by rules; the spirit of sport is found in the rules that govern competition.
Finding the Spirit of Sport: It’s in the Rules We Make
Ultimately, our collective agreement to respect and abide by rules traces its modern history to Pierre de Coubertin and the movement he founded, the Olympic movement. Modern sport—including college sports in the United States and professional sports leagues around the world—has been deeply influenced by the philosophy of “Olympism . . . a philosophy of life which places sport at the service of humanity”31 and that demands that athletes swear “an oath of fidelity to the rules and unselfishness.” The Olympic oath of fidelity became formalized as the Olympic Oath, written by Coubertin, in the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium. The oath reads: “In the name of all competitors, I promise that we shall take part in these Olympic Games, respecting and abiding by the rules that govern them, in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honour of our teams.”32 Other sports typically have their own version of an oath of fidelity. For instance, the NFL has what it calls an “Integrity of the Game Certification,” which emphasizes adherence to the rules.33
Does this mean that the spirit of sport is to be found in the rules that govern sport and without which there would be no sport? Maybe. But looking for the spirit in the rules is problematic, because the rules are often—perhaps usually—open to interpretation. And the scope for interpretation can be so wide that the people and institutions whose job it is to enforce those rules—from referees and umpires to sports bodies and governments—find it all but impossible to do their jobs.
Moreover, the rules that govern sport are not purely technical or legalistic lists of dos and don’ts. At their core, the rules are the practical reflections of the abstract values that we and all sport-loving individuals and societies hold dear.
Over the past century, the phrase “spirit of sport” has been subject to as much textual exegesis as any biblical passage.34 The notion of the spirit of sport goes as far back as the Old Testament, which declares that “if anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor’s crown unless he competes according to the rules.”35 It is thus no surprise that the many symbols and rites of the Olympic Games evoke the trappings of a formal religion.
Religion deals with very big questions (such as “Why are we here?”). The questions that sport presents aren’t that big, but they aren’t trivial either: How should we behave? What should the rules be? Who gets to decide? Sport has long upheld a value structure that provides justifications for answering questions like these. The core values in this structure have been amateurism, purity, autonomy, and uncertainty. Unfortunately, no matter how appealing these values may be in their abstract, idealized forms, they no longer serve sport particularly well in the twenty-first century. Exactly why and how they are outmoded is something that will become clearer as this book progresses, but let’s take a quick look at each of these values and the battles being fought to save them or to change them.
Amateurism
The battle over amateurism has been going on for a while. The words amateur and professional came into their modern usage in the first decade of the nineteenth century.36 The ancient Greeks are often held up as the model of amateurism in sport, but the reality is that the Greeks had no such concept, and the original Olympians were well rewarded for their sporting accomplishments. Early Olympians organized into the equivalent of modern-day trade unions to negotiate their pay, the structure of the game, and even their pension plans. The modern version of the Olympics was based on a mythological concept of amateurism. The American athlete Jim Thorpe, of Native American ancestry, was stripped of his 1912 Olympic gold medal in the decathlon because he had played minor league professional baseball in 1911, earning $60 per month.37 It wouldn’t be until the 1980s that the notion of “amateurism” in the Olympic Games was replaced by an ethos of professionalism. Today, a major battleground over amateurism focuses on college athletics in the United States, where amateurism has broken down but has yet to be fully replaced.
Purity
The notion of “purity” in sport comes up in several of the battlefields discussed in this book. Amateurism reflects a kind of purity in the sense of the love of competition untainted by the supposedly crass desire for material gain. As one scholar has written, “such commercialization debases the nobility and purity of sport as an activity and opens the road to corruption, gambling, fixing and exploitation.”38 The puritanical ideal in sport is found in the tales of nude Greek athletes. There, too, the reality is less pure than the mythology we have created.39 Not everyone today has abandoned “a fanciful notion of purity in sport,”40 but many of us—probably most of us—have embraced a more realistic view. Our healthy cynicism, however, is not shared (not publicly, anyway) by many sports bodies, which continue to invoke purity as the basis for policies related to doping, technological augmentation, sex testing, and even match fixing.
Uncertainty
What is sport anyway? A leading school of thought is that sports, as contrasted with other forms of entertainment, are defined by what is called “uncertainty of outcome.” Ryan Rodenberg, a professor of sport management at Florida State University, explains that “uncertainty of outcome” is “what differentiates spectator sports as a form of entertainment from other (scripted) options such as books, films, musicals, and professional wrestling.”43 Uncertainty of outcome has come into focus because of heightened concerns about “match fixing”—the prearrangement of sporting outcomes, which might be wins or losses or discrete actions within a game. Usually, match fixing is associated with gambling and an effort to secure an improper edge in betting markets; sport is just a means of securing that edge. Using the notion of “uncertainty of outcome” to define sport is deeply problematic, however. Consider that competition is nothing more than efforts by opposing parties to remove uncertainty of outcome, because competition, by definition, involves different parties trying to assure themselves (and not their opponents) of victory. The fuzziness of “uncertainty of outcome” makes defining match fixing difficult, and trying to regulate it almost impossible. Sport, I argue, is more than uncertainty of outcome.
Autonomy
The notion that sports bodies should be free to govern themselves without interference from governments has a long history. The notion of “autonomy” in sports governance originates in Europe, where, “for most of the 20th century, the majority of European states allowed sports organisations to develop as bodies fully independent of the public authorities.”41 In 1955, the Olympic charter stated that “National Olympic Committees must be completely independent and autonomous and entirely removed from political, religious or commercial influence.”42 In today’s era of big money sponsorships and vast governmental influence over sport, the notion of autonomy of governance may seem quaint. But even today, sports bodies, especially international ones, expect to have autonomy over decision making. In practice, autonomy has led to a lack of accountability and numerous governance failures. At the same time, many professional sports organizations, such as the NFL and the NBA, are deeply interwoven with public authorities—some would say far too tightly intertwined. Finding the right balance of self-governance and public involvement in sports bodies is a defining challenge of the contemporary sport landscape.
Throughout this book, I argue that the values of amateurism, purity, autonomy, and uncertainty no longer serve sport well and should be replaced. Traditionalists may object, protesting that we can’t just cast values aside, that values aren’t fashion accessories; they are enduring,