can’t. As we will see, science has an important role to play in antidoping, but too much science can make matters worse. In sex testing, science cannot provide a unique or simple test to tell who is and who is not a woman. Asking science to answer questions like this encourages us to hide questions about gender and politics in the guise of technical issues. And that serves no one.
Science and other forms of expertise have an important role to play in winning the war for sport, but only if we put experts in their proper place. A crucial challenge for the sports world is to be able to secure independent advice from experts, especially when that advice may be uncomfortable or challenge conventional wisdom. Too often, sports organizations rely on experts who may have conflicts of interest, which in turn may compromise their advice or how it is perceived. Better advice doesn’t mean that better decisions will be made, although it is likely to help.
Securing better advice is one part of the need to improve sports governance overall. For many decades, sports organizations, particularly international ones, like the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) or the International Olympic Committee (IOC), have evolved under the principle that they should be able to govern themselves. In the language of the sports world, these organizations should have “autonomy.” And for a long time, governments, sponsors, and athletes have supported this view. However, in recent years, autonomy has been used as a cover for corruption and the exploitation of athletes. Autonomy has failed sport.
We can look at recent governance failures in sport for guidance on how things might be done better. Greater accountability and transparency does not mean that sports should be taken over by the United Nations or that international sports organizations should become international corporations, although both options are well worth discussing. Rather, in whatever form sports organizations take in the twenty-first century, they should be expected to adopt the best practices of modern governance as they are applied to other national and international organizations outside of sport. It doesn’t seem a lot to ask, but sports organizations have often resisted such calls.
Finally, winning the war for sport depends on articulating a new set of values to guide sport to replace those that are outdated. And athletes should be at the center of the process of identifying those values. The voices of the athletes who play sport should no longer be silenced or ignored by the people who administer sport. Only then can the rules that make sport possible be truly legitimate and broadly accepted. Winning the war for sport will require much more open debate and discussion than has been the case to date. Such a conversation may be difficult at times, it may involve strongly held opposing points of view, and it may enter uncomfortable territory. Let’s get started!
a Cseh was 0.67 seconds behind Phelps in the 200-meter butterfly and 2.29 and 2.32 seconds behind Phelps in the 200-meter and 400-meter individual medleys, respectively; http://www.olympic.org/olympic-results/beijing-2008/swimming.
b Slocum likely has Woods to thank for more than $8 million of his career earnings, due to what I call the “Tiger effect” of Woods’s popularity on Tour purses. See Roger Pielke, Jr., “Measuring the ‘Tiger Effect’: Doubling of Tour Prizes, Billions into Players’ Pockets,” Sporting Intelligence, August 6, 2014, http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2014/08/06/measuring-the-tiger-effect-doubling-of-tour-prize-money-billions-extra-into-players-pockets-060801/.
c Ronaldo’s followers make up about 12 percent of all Twitter’s active followers every month (about 320 million in early 2016; see https://about.twitter.com/company). As of this writing, only twelve Twitter personas had more followers than Ronaldo: seven of those were singers, one was a talk show host, one was Barack Obama, and three were companies.
d In the NFL, the penalty is technically four games, which could occur in consecutive weeks.
e The Patriots insist that there is a perfectly innocent explanation for this remarkable coincidence; see Sean Wagner-McGough, “Patriots: Ball Boy Called Self ‘Deflator’ Because Wanted to Lose Weight,” CBSSports.com (May 14, 2015), http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/25185129/patriots-attendant-called-himself-deflator-because-he-was-trying-to-lose-weight.
f A new term was coined in the process: “technological fraud.” See Benoit Noel, “Cookson Confirms ‘Technological Fraud’ at Cyclocross Worlds,” VELONEWS (January 31, 2016), http://velonews.competitor.com/2016/01/news/first-technological-fraud-case-rocks-cycling-world_394276.
g No so fast, you might say, based on headlines in 2016: http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/20/news/companies/target-transgender-bathroom-lgbt/.
The word sport, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, derives from the Old English word disport, which refers to “anything which affords diversion and entertainment.”1 Writing in the 1600s, Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician, mulled on the nature of happiness and human life. He wrote of the challenges faced by humans and how they wear on us: “We either think on the miseries we have, or on those that threaten us.”2 Yet, Pascal continued, although we may be “filled with a thousand essential causes of weariness, as a game of billiards, suffices to divert [us].”
Sport—playing a game—does indeed divert us. Yet sport is far more than a mere diversion. Sport can be found everywhere and across time. It is no exaggeration to say that sport is fundamental to the human experience.
A few hundred years ago, the word sport was a euphemism for sex. In 1772, the English writer Thomas Bridges observed, “in England, if you trust report, Whether in country, town, or court, The parsons daughters make best sport.”3 Given how much people like competition, it is probably understandable that the modern usage of the word sport shares an etymological history with romps with the parson’s daughter. Apart from sex (or maybe even more than sex), the modern understanding of sport as a competition, typically but not always athletic, offers something close to a universal human value.
This chapter takes a look at what has been called the “spirit of sport”—a phrase that comes from the modern Olympic movement and characterizes the values underlying the rules of sport. Figure 2.1 shows the frequency of the usage of the phrase “spirit of sport” in English-language books. A century ago, the spirit of sport was much discussed as the institutions and games of the modern Olympic, college, and professional sports began to take shape. The phrase fell out of favor in the second half of the twentieth century as the institutions of sport assumed their modern forms, but it has seen a remarkable resurgence in the twenty-first century.
Figure 2.1. Frequency of the Phrase “Spitit of Sport (1860–2008)
Souce: Google Ngrams, https://books.google.com/ngrams.
One reason for this resurgence is the ongoing war for the soul of sport. As we fight