How effortless brilliance lost out to hard work

I WAS sitting in The Angel in Halesworth, Suffolk, when a little sport drifted into the conversation.

Andy Murray

I WAS sitting in The Angel in Halesworth, Suffolk, with friends from the World Land Trust talking wildlife and conservation shop when a little sport drifted into the conversation. You know how it does. So I talked a bit about Andy Murray, and expressed my admiration for the way relentless work and first-class organisation by many people - especially Murray - brought him those three significant victories inside a year.

"Yes, but it's not what sport is supposed to be about, is it?" Roger Wilson said. He's an expert on forestry. He had been talking earlier about his long-drop lav in Africa. It had a resident spitting cobra, requiring users to don goggles before seeking relief.

Roger, then, has been about a bit. This was a gut response from a smart person mildly interested in sport and, as such, worthy of respect. Certainly it caused me to stop and think. Because Team Murray would not have been possible when sport first began.

It would have been regarded as an aberration, something that transgressed the spirit of sport. Sport wasn't invented as an opportunity for hard work, deep intellectual effort and a vast, fully equipped, highly paid back-up team. Au contraire.

Traditionally, the thing most admired in sport was effortless brilliance. You just had so much talent that you couldn't help winning. You imagine C.B. Fry handing his blazer and cigar to a friend to break the world long-jump record before going back to the cricket to score a century. Sport should be like that.

Training was a kind of cheating. Hiring a coach was unthinkable: Harold Abrahams' decision to do both was a scandal in the film Chariots of Fire. It was nasty, underhand, typically Jewish. It was a dirty trick to steal what should rightfully belong to others. It was - prepare for some strong language here - ungentlemanly. The sort of thing you expect from the jumped-up, the socially ambitious, the sort of little tick you wouldn't let in the house, even to fix the pipes.

Sport was about doing stuff for the fun of it, for the love of it, and the best man (it was always a man) won. Sport was developed as a celebration of nature, not nurture. It extolled what you were born with, not what you had been at pains to develop. It was natural ability that mattered, along with the natural love for doing it.

Sport was, then, about privilege. The aristocrats mattered most in society because they were born better than the rest. They were "our betters", they told us so in as many words, and their naturally greater ability in sport was a small confirmation of this. The upper classes were superior to clerks and miners because they were born that way. Inevitably, they were better at sport.

There were other factors, of course, less discussed. Wealth provides leisure and better diet: the old belief that the upper classes were taller than the rest of us was the literal truth. In the 19th century, a beef-fed son of a great house was always going to be faster than a miner fed on bread and dripping, even if the miner could find time for anything as trivial as sport. But it was more amusing - especially for the upper classes - to put victory down to the suggestion that better blood flowed through their veins.

So sport tended, on the whole, to exalt the class system and the sense of entitlement that comes from birth. Anyone who tried to change that was a cad and a rotter and bounder.

But sport has changed radically. The big prizes no longer go to languid aristocrats who just happen to turn up: they go to professional athletes who have trained to the point of self-harm and beyond. They are supported by commerce or public money. They have trainers, physiotherapist, psychologists, strategists.

Sport no longer rewards only superiority of birth. It also rewards ambition, work, expertise, planning. Cricketers routinely give credit to statistical and video analysts: "For example, one batsman might score 60 per cent of his runs between extra cover and mid-off and that's invaluable knowledge because you know you won't be hurt in other areas." That was Gareth Batty, the Surrey off-spinner, praising the county's performance manager, David Court, in the London Evening Standard this week.

Top-level sport no longer showcases casual superiority and the advantages of birth. Certainly you need to start with the right genetic package, but these days no one thinks that such gifts are restricted to a single social class.

It's a while since Old Etonians last won the FA Cup (1882, since you ask). Sport started by celebrating nature: modern sport goes on to celebrate nurture, not instead but as well. That has forced further changes into sport. Casual brilliance is no longer the most admirable trait - modern athletes must now pursue a profound all-consuming excellence.

Top-level sport can no longer be a sideline. To be a top athlete you must give everything. And so must your people. Chris Froome won the Tour de France because he has devoted his life to cycling excellence, because his teammates gave him the support of total commitment, and because the training regimen and in-race organisation of Team Sky are quite exceptional.

We now prize many more things in sport than inborn talent. We accept sport as a legitimate vector for genuine excellence.

We know that sport doesn't save people's lives and it doesn't do anything to stop the ecological holocaust, but as an example of excellence in the abstract it has a profound metaphorical meaning. That is one of the reasons sport holds the world's attention as entertainment.

And Roger is right, sport was never intended for such things. Sport was invented for fun. Sport was then encouraged and to an extent codified as a medium for betting. Sport was hijacked and organised by educationists as a teacher of morality. Sport was also cherished as a demonstration of natural talent. Sport is now a money-maker, an aspect of global power in both political and financial terms, and it is widely accepted as a cause to which people can legitimately dedicate their lives.

If you were to design an activity for the pursuit of physical and mental excellence, you probably wouldn't come up with sport as we know it. Sport has changed its function and its meaning across the years - but part of its meaning lies in its convoluted history and its bewildering and complex changes of use.

But changes of use occur all the time. Dinosaurs developed feathers for insulation: by coincidence, they turned out to be ideal for flight. Feathers were never intended to make an eagle fly, but they do. Fish developed swim bladders to remain stationary in the water - in other vertebrates this structure turned out to be quite useful as lungs.

Sport was once pretty good at demonstrating superiority of birth - it's now gloriously vivid at demonstrating the synthesis of nature and nurture in the pursuit of excellence. It wasn't what sport was invented for, but it's what sport is now and it's pretty damned good at this secondary use.

The Times