sporthunder.com

It is difficult to report a sporting contest where no rituals precede and conclude the events and punctuated revered activity. The ancient Olympics included several days of purification of athletes prior to the events, regularized procedures before and after the events, and closing ceremonies. The current Olympic Games set aside massive resources for rituals before and after the official schedule of competitions. Even impromptu sporting contests everywhere in the world include mechanisms of selection of sides, starting the action, and symbolizing venerated performances. Each day of the Tour de France ends with an elaborate ritual of the stage winner and leader, wearing the yellow jersey. Softball players at the Olympics elaborately queue at the end of a game to shake hands respectfully with each of the opposing team’s players.
Deviations from aesthetic standards yield strong censure among governing bodies and audiences. Tommie Smith and John Carlos won, respectively, gold and bronze medals in the 200m race in Mexico City in 1968. On the medal stand they displayed civil-rights badges (as did the silver medalist, Peter Norman of Australia). Smith and Carlos made the “black-power salute” with gloved fists during the playing of the U.S. national anthem. Their breach of ritual form infuriated the International Olympic Committee, which demanded the United States Olympic Committee send them home and banish them from further competition.

The rules of sport intend equal chances for competitors and some protection for participants, yet they must establish barriers for physical acumen so that the test creates a challenge that yields differences in success. Despite these factors, periods and sites display variations in the aesthetic features of performance. Artistic gymnastics and figure skating are examples where whole events include express and implied aesthetic criteria of performance. Derogatory comments on performances that technically accord with rules occur in all sports, such as displaying poor manners (one could not remove an article of clothing without penalty in the 1924 Tour de France), insufficient effort, clumsy execution, mean-spirited demeanor, or an inadequately flashy end (“the victory of a moribund,” said Henri Degranges, the race director, of Maurice de Waele’s victory in the 1929 Tour de France).
Body proportions and comportment themselves may produce reasons for aesthetic valorization or criticism. The body of the gymnast was of a mature woman through the early 1970s, but with the performance of Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics, the women’s gymnastics body was required to conform to new standards. Dress conventions for athletes required to meet the same physical demands of contrived hazard show how standards of aesthetics override demands of the sport itself. While purity was expressed by nudity in the ancient Olympics, dress conventions of participants since that time reflect prevailing national standards. Participation in sports and interest itself may depend on a minimal preoccupation with the body as a medium of cultural identity and memory. Restrictions on clothing suitable for maximum athletic performance may exist in current cultures (Islamic, for example) that exclude women from performing since they may have to display, inappropriately, anatomical parts.
An athlete’s nonathletic identity and orientation may enter into an aesthetic evaluation of the performer’s sport proficiency and success. One’s sexual orientation, for example, though entirely unrelated to eligibility to perform, quality of effort, and event success, may affect evaluations by other performers, journalists, and spectators. In the mid-twentieth century, when public views of age- and sex-appropriate activities stereotyped older, married women as unfit for sport, aesthetic evaluations of momentous athletic accomplishments done by mothers could be muted or negative. Francina “Fanny” Blankers-Koen won four gold medals for Holland in the 1948 Games in London (100m and 200m runs, 80m hurdles, and the 4 5 100m relay). But her initial entry into the Games was strongly criticized by the public and press in her country, because she was married, had borne two children, and was thought too old to compete. (Aesthetic guidelines for tastes are often mutable, of course, as once this athlete had won, her country liberally welcomed her home as a heroine.)

For sixty years the best sports stories have been collected for North American sports, with the present series, The Best American Sports Writing, occurring since 1991.We know how the editors of the series evaluate sports performance by selection of type of sport, the degree of accuracy in evoking a sense of reality, how they sharply mark off prevailing values of society (intelligence, perseverance, motivation, self-sacrifice, for example) and how they negate bad values such as laziness, deceit, and personal aggrandizement. Cultures produce, select, and retain stories that encapsulate the values of their peoples. Often the achievements of a team or an individual are foregrounded as heroic, and the basis of the special achievement encapsulates the aesthetic of a culture.

Aesthetics captures a culture’s ideas of beauty, proportion, and taste. It fulfills a purpose like politics, the economy, and religion, similarly addressing the social tasks a society must resolve. Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the U.S. professional football team, the Green Bay Packers, urged, “Winning is not everything; it is the only thing.” Aesthetics appears in the injunction that, “It is not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.”
Eminent philosophers seriously contemplate aesthetic standards. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) is honored for his theories of knowledge and his political philosophy, but his Poetics develops his idea of beauty with consummate rigor. Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) total philosophical system includes guidelines for evaluating knowledge (Critique of Pure Reason) and ethics (Critique of Practical Reason) but also his theory of aesthetics (Critique of Judgment). Standards of the good, proportion, and beauty infuse a culture with ultimate goals—aesthetics. Sport is physical, rule governed, usually an end in itself, and matters deeply to those who compete and watch.The activity is a serviceable medium of a culture’s memories through stories, performances of athletes, and rituals surrounding sport. Sport serves economic, political, and, possibly, religious ends. But in the forms of social memory, sport is most efficient when meeting expectations of a culture’s aesthetics. Sport is especially serviceable as a vehicle of social memory, since it is a common vocabulary for citizens, it evokes attention from all our senses, and the characteristic clear winner rivets our interest within an ordinary world where performances are usually indistinguishable. Identifying the standards of quality in this type of social memory gives sport its potential for maximum importance in carrying its moral load; compromising of aesthetic standards portends loss of this vehicle of cultural memory.Two hundred countries participated in the 2004 Olympics; the outcome for each was heightened when the athletes faithfully embodied the cultures’ aesthetic standards.