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Sport, Ethics and Philosophy

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Olympic Ethics and Philosophy: Old

Wine in New Bottles
Mike McNamee & Jim Parry
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 Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 2, May 2012

Editorial

OLYMPIC ETHICS AND PHILOSOPHY:

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES

Mike McNamee and Jim Parry

As we pen this essay, in mid-January 2012, the inaugural Winter Youth Olympic
Games is taking place. It follows the first Summer Youth Olympic Games held in Singapore
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in 2010. This extension of the idea of the Olympic festival into the youth and child
populations is arguably a response of the Olympic movement to a perceived reduction in
young peoples interest and participation in sport an attempt to re-motivate youth
towards Olympic values, in the face of those many other attractions and distractions
competing for their attention and commitment. Scholars and scientists have queried the
need for and desirability of such an innovation. Worries abound that it might push children
towards harmfully early specialisation, that it might lead to the commodification of youth
athletes, or that it is little more than an unwelcome replication of the quadrennial global
sports festival that is the Olympics.
Such a development, of course, raises again the most fundamental questions: what
are the values that drive the Olympic movement and how will these be realised or
transformed in the Youth Olympic Games (YOG)? In the YOG they have been distilled into
the new slogan, Excellence, Friendship, Respect, but it is not clear whence this neologism
has sprung, nor its relation to earlier formulations or other emphases. In particular, the
Fundamental Principles of Olympism outlined in the Olympic Charter emphasise
the values of fair play and effort, which are missing here. In any case, the fact that
the International Olympic Committee has not merely replicated its celebrated slogan
citius, altius, fortius (swifter, higher, stronger) suggests that there was a felt need to re-
articulate the Olympic idea for new generations.
This mutation reminds us that the Olympic Games, and the Olympic movement
more generally, is not a static phenomenon, but one that changes through time, and
requires continued attention and analysis. The fact that any social phenomenon
necessarily has a history, and has been socially constructed, might lead us to suppose
that a historico-social explanation will exhaust our efforts to understand such a social
institution. This would, however, be unacceptably reductionist. Such an assumption trades
on the mistaken belief or mere bias that all explanations of the human reduce to the social.
It exhibits in classic form the genetic fallacy where it is claimed that an explanation of the
origins of any given phenomenon explains that phenomenon exhaustively. Such a claim
exhibiting the genetic fallacy is often made of the Olympic Games itself, that qua its
origination in ancient Greece it must be a Eurocentric phenomenon.
This collection is a timely reflection on Olympic matters both old and new. It
comprises critical exploration of new practices such as the YOG, as well as ancient ones

ISSN 1751-1321 print/1751-133X online/12/02010305

2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17511321.2012.676826
 104 MIKE McNAMEE AND JIM PARRY

such as the Olympic Truce and its place and purpose in the twenty-first century, in which
major conflicts are still ongoing and threaten international good will, which has always
been proclaimed as a value by the official ideology or philosophy of the Olympic
movement: Olympism The essays variously attempt to connect Olympism with deeper
ethical and philosophical roots, analysing the values of the Olympics with new facts and
theories, and situating this cosmopolitan modernist sporting movement in contexts of
power-senstive social and political movements that celebrate diversity and equality across
categories such as gender, body identity and transitory cultural and national identities.
The first essays of the volume focus on historical matters. One of Heather Reids main
academic interests is in ancient philosophy, including the philosophy of ancient sport. In
this volume, she turns her attention to The Political Heritage of the Olympic Games to
the politics of sport, both ancient and modern. Keep politics out of sport was a popular
slogan in the 1970s and 1980s, amid Olympic boycotts, disputes between the USA and the
USSR, and the anti-apartheid movement but this is a notoriously difficult position to
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square with the overtly political aims of Olympism towards peace, equal opportunity and
inclusion, tolerance and non-discrimination, and environmentalism. Reid argues that a
better understanding of the ancient games political achievements might increase the
modern Olympic movements chances of realising its own political goals.
Naofumi Masumoto too reflects on an often neglected aspect of the Olympic
Games, namely the Olympic Truce. The Ekecheiria, as it was known in ancient times, was a
sacred truce between parties who wished to participate in the games but who might
otherwise be in conflict. Masumoto accounts for its modern resurrection in the wake of the
Second World War. He argues that the 1992 Barcelona games marks an important juncture
of the Olympic movements political aspirations,since it was in this year that the IOC
worked with the United Nations to agree jointly on a peace resolution during the days of
the games. He notes, however, that the ongoing verbal and written agreements of leading
political figures, sporting and otherwise, have been under recent threat by international
conflicts in the shape of the Gulf War and the Georgian conflict. Moreover, despite the
promotion of the truce at the 2008 Beijing games, Masumoto notes the lack of televisual
coverage of such promotion. The extent to which, therefore, the peace movement that is
exemplified by the truce is still a genuinely held commitment of leading political figures
and IOC leaders is a moot point.
Continuing the theme of ancient to modern, Jim Parry addresses in his essay the
most recent of innovations: the YOG. He presents some of the principles underlying the
YOG and some of the practical challenges in implementing them. Among the impressive
innovations and achievements was the introduction of mixed-gender and mixed-
nationality competitions, new sport forms or events in basketball (three v three on a
half-court, with one basket), sailing (sail-boarding) and modern pentathlon (laser pistol).
Notably, the Singapore games saw the first Olympic participation by a Saudi woman.
Today, the Winter YOG has seen the first Olympic womens ski-jumping competition, and
the first African medals to be won in a winter games. Parry examines some of the ethical
issues arising from what might be seen as a distribution of the values of elite sport into the
child population, such as immaturity and harm, talent identification and early specialisa-
tion, and the exploitation of young athletes. Other issues arising from the first edition of the
YOG relate to participation and equality of opportunity, age and fairness norms, age
falsification and cheating, and recurring themes such as victory and defeat, participation
and excellence, and political discrimination, peace and international understanding.
 EDITORIAL 105

Sigmund Loland discusses the central notion of Olympism laid out by its founder the
Baron Pierre de Coubertin: the Olympic athlete who lives a well balanced life based on
the joy of effort. He invites consideration of whether this is anachronistic hype or
whether it can still represent a meaningful idea. His answer takes the form of a critical
examination of Olympic ideals in terms of three different theoretical understandings of the
athlete. Dualist, phenomenological and contextualist accounts are each examined for their
virtues and their inadequacies, and Loland brings out those complementary features of
the three perspectives which contribute to a comprehensive study of Olympic ideals.
It is well known that the French aristocrat held a highly idealised conception of sport
that could be crystallised in the Olympic Games. Irena Martnkova continues the de
Coubertinian theme by considering a distinction he drew between two kinds of sport
Olympic sport and world championship sport. He presents them as alternative possible
approaches to sport, between which we must choose, and he characterises them through
the metaphors in her title: Fair or temple: two possibilities for Olympic sport. Whoever
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chooses the fair (or the market-place) accepts conventional social norms and exhibits
heteronomy and inauthenticity, leading to an instrumental approach to sporting
engagement. The choice of the temple brings with it a concern for the intrinsic values
and internal goods of sport and leads us to an authentic consideration of our own
existence, and an approach to sport that sees it as a kind of self-development based on
self-understanding. Martnkova develops this contrast by presenting alternative existential
possibilities for us. Drawing on the work of Heidegger and Patocka she explains how we
must each choose our overall life direction and orientation, including how we are to live
our sporting lives. Her analysis throws light on de Coubertins understanding of
amateurism, which meant for him not the simple exclusion of working people from
gentlemanly sports clubs, but rather the pursuit of sport for its internal goods, and not for
external rewards temple, not fair.
Because of the breadth of de Coubertins scholarship and ensuing personal and
public communications over many decades, many connections can be made to
established European philosophical authors and currents. In Olympism, the values of
sport and the will to power: de Coubertin and Nietzsche meet Eugenio Monti, Cleret and
McNamee explore the relation between the philosophical anthropology of both authors,
and especially Nietzsches concept of the Ubermensch. A case study is conducted, based
on the story of the Italian Eugenio Monti, the first recipient of the Pierre de Coubertin
medal, which rewards fair play. Monti famously assisted the British two-man bobsleigh
team to win gold in Innsbruck in 1964 by lending them a screw from his own bob, without
which they could not have completed their final, and gold-winning, run, which consigned
the Italians to third place. The subsequent analysis of Montis supererogation is articulated
through the eyes of Nietzsche, sympathetically observed. The authors conclude that both
he and de Coubertin considered that competition is not simply to be understood in terms
of the domination of others, but more specifically in terms of the generating of human
excellence.
In Pandora logic, Leon Culbertson considers the role of general moral principles,
such as the Fundamental Principles of Olympism outlined in the Olympic Charter, in the
making of particular judgements on doping issues, with special reference to the case of
Alain Baxter, who won (and then had to return, due to a doping offence) the only Olympic
ski-ing medal ever won by a Briton. While, clearly, Baxter was guilty under the strict liability
rule (that is, he was responsible for the presence of the substance in his body), and while
 106 MIKE McNAMEE AND JIM PARRY

the point of such rules is to prevent the Pandoras box of excuses from being opened
(even such a genuine excuse as Baxters, on everyones admission), Culbertson argues that
a principle-based approach is not an appropriate way to assess the case from a moral
point of view. In order to explain why this is so, he employs two distinctions: one between
moral judgements (the outcome of our consideration of the morality of an action) and
morally-laden judgements (the outcome of our need to decide what to do about it) the
latter going beyond simple moral judgement, in deciding what action to take. The second
distinction is between the moral judgement of cases, which he argues requires a
particularist approach, and the ethical environment of a society where general moral
principles apply. His conclusions track these distinctions: Baxter ought to be viewed as an
example of blameless guilt.
Graham McFee provides a fresh slant on Olympism and sports intrinsic value.
Whereas the usual approach (including that of de Coubertin) to the morally educative
power of sport emphasises the importance of sports participation, McFee wonders about
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the possibly similar effects of spectatorship. Indeed, if the Olympic Games is to be seen as
a kind of advertisement for ethical and educative sport, as de Coubertin intended, then
such spectator effects must be central to his vision. McFee has in mind the modern global
television audience amounting to billions of spectators. Drawing on his previous work on
the intrinsic value of sport and on the notion of sport as a moral laboratory, he develops
an account of sports spectatorship that affords possibilities for moral education, as viewers
seek understandings of sporting actions and events (at least partly) through a moral
perspective.
In Smoke and mirrors, Charlene Weaving investigates nude images of women
Olympians in magazines and calendars, arguing that such sexual objectification trivialises
their talent and skill. Using Nussbaums seven-aspect theory of objectification, she
develops a categorisation system to analyse the images, and then explores various
justifications for nude posing, such as compensating for lack of funding, enhancing media
image and marketability, showcasing strong powerful and athletic female bodies and
presenting a heterosexual persona. Building on previous scholarship in the sexualisation of
sports, which includes a critique of the sexualised dress requirements in the rules of beach
volleyball, she raises wider questions regarding the instrumentalisation and exploitation of
the female body in sport. She concludes that any suggestion that women might be
empowered by nude displays relies on the smoke-and-mirrors effect of short-term
attention to sexualised identities, rather than to an acknowledgement of their equal
positioning in society, and respect for their abilities and achievements.
In Paralympians outperforming Olympians Gregor Wolbring considers the
developing role of therapeutic performance enhancements that might enable so-called
impaired athletes to outperform non-impaired athletes. His aim, though, is not to enter
the debate over relative performance assessments (for example, of whether the cheetah
gives an advantage over a leg), but rather to ask us to rethink our preconceptions of ability
impairment. The disabled athlete is often defined as a sub-species-typical agent. An
alternative, transhumanist, approach to ability, which sees the improvement of human
bodily abilities beyond species-typical boundaries as desirable, challenges this perception.
This raises the possibility that the generation of therapeutic performance enhancements
might lead to a paradigm shift in which disabled and non-disabled athletes compete
together in the mastery of assistive devices, whether therapeutic devices such as
wheelchairs and exoskeletons or performance devices such as bobsleighs or vault-poles.
 EDITORIAL 107

Such a potential paradigm shift might enable a corresponding shift in the ability-
relationship between disabled and non disabled athletes, as assistive devices enable the
disabled to compete on equal terms and even out-perform non-disabled athletes.
Wolbring suggests that this might call into question the need for separate Olympic
Games, or it might usher in a new division between Assisted Games and Games Without
Devices.
Where Weaving and Wolbring address political issues to do with sexual and bodily
identity, the final essays of the adopt national political frameworks. The authors of The
moral pathologies of national sporting representation at the Olympics interrogate the
familiar issue of sports migration, but focusing in particular on the motivations for and
morality of the somehow disturbing phenomenon of nation-swapping. Hywel Iorwerth,
Carwyn Jones and Alun Hardman argue for a sincere internationalism and a reflective
nationalism and, in that context, outline three ways in which recent developments in
international sporting representation might be seen as pathological: if they instrumenta-
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lise national sporting representation (using it as a means, not as an end in itself); if they
undermine the point of national representation at the Olympics; and if they sustain
distributive injustice by commodifying sporting talent and labour, and thus advantaging
already wealthy nations. They argue that a sincere internationalism would see some recent
practices as undermining the moral credentials of Olympic competition, and would push
for changes in the rules. The paper draws on empirical data gathered from interviews with
past sporting internationals and key figures from the sports practice community in Wales.
As well as their intrinsic interest, such data are important in raising the issue for applied
philosophers of empirical philosophy, currently enjoying a period of development in
fields as dissimilar as philosophy of science and aesthetics.
The theme of national representation and its authenticity is also raised by Cesar
Torres in his discussion of Expatriate coaching, Olympism and the Olympic Games, where
he defends the notion of coaches from one country offering their services to a host
country not of their birth. Much has been made of the migration of sporting labour from
the countries of an athletes birth to another. The criteria used for justifying such moves
have varied from athlete to athlete, whether in terms of the opportunity afforded to play
at international level for athletes incapable (for whatever reason) of representing their own
country; or for chances of greater international exposure or success; or, of course, for
greater financial gain. Much less ink has been spilt on the migration of coaching labour,
perhaps because it is thought to be less contentious. Torres argues that moderate
patriotism does not oblige one to privilege the country of ones birth. Moreover, he argues
that the drive for excellence, constitutive of Olympism, is in accordance with the migration
of the sporting labour of coaches, and that the gains from such arrangements can extend
beyond the giver and receiver of coaching expertise.
It is hoped that the essays presented here show the vitality of Olympism itself. It is a
rich and complex concept not exhausted by its official definition. Moreover that
complexity is manifested year after year as issues regarding sport at the highest level are
played out in the biannual sports festivals of the Olympic, Paralympic and Youth Olympic
Games. Insofar as the Olympic movement continually renews itself in response to
economic, political, scientific and technological challenges, we hope and expect that the
ethical and philosophical issues that are insinuated within its structure, symbols and
practices continue to be both interrogated and nourished by vigorous philosophical
analysis and critique.