Excellence – A Mutual Quest – the True Ideal of Sport - Robert Simon
The following is an excerpt from a classic text written on excellence in competition. Written by one of the world's best known authorities on the subject, the excerpt is s follows:
Competition in sport frequently has been defended in terms of the search for excellence in performance. Top athletes, whether their motivation arises from adherence to the internal values of competition or desire for external reward, are willing to pay a heavy price in time and effort in order to achieve competitive success. When this price consists of time spent in hard practice, we are prepared to praise the athlete as a worker and true competitor.
But when athletes attempt to achieve excellence through the use of performance –enhancing drugs, there is widespread condemnation. Is such condemnation justified? What is wrong with the use of drugs to achieve excellence in sport? …. Why shouldn't individual athletes be left at liberty to pursue excellence by any means they freely choose? Robert Simon
The answer to Simon's question lies in what is the purpose of the activity and what is our role within that activity. Each athlete is not a person unto themselves. Rather every athlete competes against others and with others. When the athlete loses sight of the need for a cooperative perspective then excellence is reduced to winning alone. Simon continues…
Competition in the context of sports is most defensible ethically when understood as a mutual quest for excellence in the intelligent and directed use of athletic skills in the face of challenge.
The mutual quest here is knowing and understanding the relation of one's self to other competitors.
Athletic competition of this sort, under appropriate conditions, may have such beneficial consequences as expressing important values and reinforcing the development of desirable character traits. …competition in sports may have intrinsic worth as a framework within which we express ourselves as persons and respond to others as persons in the mutual pursuit of excellence. …few universally accessible frameworks involve us as fully as agents who must intelligently use our bodies to meet challenges we have chosen.
Competition as the mutual question for excellence…is an ideal.. Actual practices may not conform to this requirement. In the real world, winning may be overemphasized, rules may be broken, athletes may be exploited, and unfair conditions…may preclude genuine challenge. If so, the ideal provides grounds for criticism of serious deviations. Robert Simon
If we lose sight of the purpose of why we have competition – this striving for excellence – we lose sight of why we are in athletics.