Olympics a showcase of values the West is deserting

A woman in the role of a priestess holds the Olympic flame after lighting it during the rehearsal of the flame lighting ceremony for the Paris 2024 Olympics Games.

For all their joys and disappointments, the finest feature of the Olympics is the virtues they celebrate: ambition, determination, discipline and, above all, merit. They don’t always live up to those virtues; but in a world that increasingly views them with disdain, proclaiming their enduring value is a virtue in itself.

It is in the emphasis on those virtues that today’s Olympics most closely resemble their ancient cousins. The Greek competitions originated in that civilisation’s earliest phases: the Olympics are commonly dated to 766BC. However, their full flowering only occurred in the political and intellectual revolutions of the 6th and especially 5th centuries BC.

That was no coincidence. As the Greek city-states transitioned from kingdoms to republics, whose freedom was threatened by civic discord internally and by aggressive neighbours externally, new values came to the fore.

Thus, “karteria”, strength of will, was crucial to prevailing in the constant wars that marred Greek life. But so too was “egkrateia”, the strength to control oneself, both so as to maintain the tight discipline that characterised Greek battle formations and to prevent the passions generated by disputes within the polis from boiling over.

Moreover, strength of will and self-control needed to be in place from the moment young adults took on the duties of republican citizenship, which included participating in the polis’ decision-making and serving in its fighting force. Relying, as in the Homeric epics, on the virtues being acquired by imitation in battle was consequently insufficient; they had to be inculcated through education, tested by rigorous challenge and rewarded by the honour excellence deserved.

Sports and sporting competitions were integral to that process. Indeed, they were so intimately linked to the overall formation of citizens who could handle fierce rivalry, in its martial and non-martial forms, that there was no specific term for sport as such. Rather, the competitions fell within the general class of “agon”, that is, confrontations between antagonists, and of “athlos”, combats or struggles, while an “athlètes” was simply someone who fought to win an honour or a prize.

As for the training, it was shaped by the pre-eminence the Greeks accorded “logos” (rational thought), “techne” (technical mastery) and “gnome” (perception, foresight and planning). Embodied in detailed manuals, enforced by specialised trainers, a demanding regime prepared boys and young men to strive for victory and avoid the disgrace of defeat.

Yes, there was inevitably an element of “tyche”, or chance, which could, in the heat of the contest, upset the best-laid plans. In the end, however, the result turned on merit, earned, said the poet Pindar, by “the sting of unrelenting discipline and the suffering of unending fatigue”.

In that sense, the competitions were the mirror image of classical Greek tragedy, which reached its peak at the same time. In the great tragedies, fate was everything, individual willpower nothing: the actors were subject to forces vastly larger and more powerful than those they could muster. By contrast, the sporting competitions were “anti-tragedies”: in them, human agency was everything, fate nothing. And by making individuals entirely responsible for the outcomes, the contests, in which only freemen could take part, reflected the ethos of societies that rested on responsible citizenship.

There were, for sure, critical voices – criticisms that mounted in and after the 3rd century BC, as the number of contests, and the prizes on offer, skyrocketed. Athletes could now earn a living by going from contest to contest, with the prizes, rather than being viewed as gifts honouring the victors, coming to be seen as entitlements, determined, often through aggressive bargaining, by athletes’ syndicates.

That athletes became narrowly specialised, professional competitors was starkly at odds with the Greek ideal of the multi-skilled citizen, ruled by reason and every bit as capable of presiding over public affairs as of defending the city. Even worse, however, was the fact that the escalating prize money encouraged widespread cheating.

In some instances, the dishonesty just involved probing the boundaries of the myriad regulations. Far from learning to respect the rules, Hippocrates complained, the gymnasiums’ students were being taught how “to break the law legally and mask breaches as compliance”. But there was also, and increasingly, organised corruption and the systematic intimidation of officials.

These were, however, only symptoms of a broader malady. As republican government waned, tyrants and demagogues trashed the merit principle, elevating winning into a virtue in its own right, rather than as the reward for the virtues sporting agonism was intended to cultivate. They had no interest in exalting human agency and personal responsibility; their interest was in glorifying themselves, while providing the “bread and circuses” that would secure popular acclaim.

Privileging spectatorship over participation, the Roman emperors gradually withdrew their support for the competitions they had inherited from the Greeks, replacing them with unspeakably savage, yet immensely popular, battles to the death, fought not by freemen but by slaves. Starved of funding, the gymnasiums shut, the trainers gradually disappeared and the Greek competitions entered into irreversible decline – well before the Christian emperor Theodosius I, in the 4th century AD, and his grandson Theodosius II, denounced them as pagan.

What could not be suppressed, however, was the notion that there was an intimate link – an “elective affinity”, Goethe would have called it – between competition on the merits and responsible citizenship.

Australian Sports Commission Chair Kate Jenkins. Picture: Supplied

Rewarding merit encouraged doing what was needed to succeed, rather than currying official favour. At the same time, a society in which rewards were earned by intelligence and exertion opened the road to talent, facilitating social mobility and enhancing prosperity. And by teaching citizens to take prudent decisions for themselves, it also taught them to shape a common future.

Yet wherever one looks, merit is being downgraded. Throughout the Western world, equality of opportunity, the Enlightenment’s lodestar, is giving way to its degenerate twin, quota thinking, variously defined by gender, ethnicity and race. Even in science, which has been ruled by merit, not authority, since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the US National Academy of Science – accepting the claim that an emphasis on merit perpetuates “racism and sexism” – now places “diversity” on a par with achievement in determining membership.

Nor has Australia escaped that pathology. The Queensland government has scrapped merit from its public sector recruitment criteria. The Commonwealth government relegates it to a mere recruitment factor in the public service’s statement of values. As for academia, the Queensland University of Technology has led the way by replacing it with “suitability”, which apparently enshrines “diversity” in appointments and promotion.

Last but not least, the new Chair of the Australian Sports Commission Kate Jenkins considers promoting “diversity” one of her key goals.

This much, however, is certain. It isn’t athletes’ skin colour, sex or ethnicity that delivers Olympic medals. It is the calibre of their talent and the depth of their determination, discipline and drive. For so long as that remains the case, the distant roar of the Greek competitions will echo through the ages.