HARDING: OLYMPICS - Taking Over From Religion? Pts. 1 &

[Oscar]

THE WINTER OLYMPICS: IS SPORT TAKING OVER FROM RELIGION? Part 1

By Jim Harding R-Town News February 28, 2014

It’s easy to become mesmerized by the well-honed abilities shown at the Olympics. After intense daily coverage the exceptional performance of youthful athletes from around the globe works its magic; even the skeptics find something to be excited about. I admire speed skating and am drawn to figure skating and curling. I followed hockey, enjoying the more graceful, less aggressive play-making on the larger ice.

The emphasis on winning, especially winning gold, can distract from appreciating the events. If we get too parochial about sports we won’t fully appreciate the achievements of all individuals, teams and coaches. That, after all, is the spirit of the Olympics, isn’t it?

All sports require huge commitment but chance and even bias can enter into outcomes. With no defeats, the women curlers under skip Jennifer Jones certainly deserve the gold. But some disquiet remains about skate couple Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue “only” getting the silver. The beauty of ice dancing gets downplayed in the quest to quantify technical feats. It’s not about scoring goals or beating the time of a competitor, as in many Olympic sports. And when half the snow-boarders wipe out in competitions held during a near white-out, it’s hard to accept that the top medal winners were necessarily “the best”. And then there’s undetected doping.

ON WITH THE GAMES

But it’s partly the vulnerability of athletes and the drama of uncertainty that makes the games compelling. Though his Japanese rival had several falls in his last skate, Patrick Chan just couldn’t muster a flawless performance to capture the gold. As one commentator after another said in a tone of disappointment, “the door was open”. Chan first apologized to Canada, but after recovering his inner balance he admitted he liked performing more than competing. Don’t we lose something when sport gets treated like a national religion?

Countries too can be fickle. Had Chan become the first Canadian male ice dancer to win gold he’d probably be displayed as a national hero. Perhaps he’d be doing commercials for corporate sponsors. But it didn’t happen, and with the winner take all mentality, silver medalists can be seen as losers. This is very stupid. Had Quebec speed skater Charles Hamelin not fallen twice when he was leading and taken home not one but three medals, he’d probably be a poster athlete.

Speed skater Denny Morrison won silver due to the generosity of a teammate who gave him his spot. Yet after his unexpected victory Morrison tweeted the CBC that “when I wake up from this dream I’m going to be really sad”. I wonder how he felt when the men’s speed skate team he was on failed to defend its gold medal from Vancouver 2010? Perhaps the obsession with winning gold is blinding us to greater personal achievements. During the Sochi Olympics, Silken Laumann released a memoir revealing how much self-loathing she carried while winning rowing medals over three Olympic Games. Treating sports as religion where athletes can be martyred on the altar of victory is not pretty; big-hearted humanity can do much better.

FIXATION ON GOLD

In Vancouver 2010 Canada won 26 medals and topped with 14 gold. The Canadian organizers raised the expectation even higher for Sochi. Own the Podium upped its spending to $89 million to train the 200 plus athletes. Canada ended in third place after Russia and Norway. (Russia by the way hired the same Canadian training consultants that Canada used in 2010.) This time Canada had fewer gold (ten) and one less overall than 2010. So did we fail? Hopefully the ten Canadian athletes who won silver and the five who won bronze won’t feel this way. Hopefully we don’t think that winning hockey gold makes these other wins less significant.

Let’s keep some perspective. Jan Hudec, who unexpectedly won bronze in the alpine race, has undergone seven knee operations since he entered this grueling sport. What will his body be like when he’s my age? It’s worth celebrating that Mark McMorris won bronze for snowboarding with broken ribs. Sarah Burke never competed in the halfpipe skiing she promoted for the Olympics, dying from a training accident in 2012. There is a huge personal cost for these sometimes foolishly dangerous events and I’m not just talking about the record-breaking $52 billion spent for Sochi.

National hype was created around winning even more gold. But greed always has its price. When things were looking bad, and Canada “only” had four gold medals and was in 8th place, the CBC shifted its reporting to total medals rather than gold. One CBC broadcaster even said “there’s only one gold that matters and that’s gold in hockey”. This would not be taken lightly by all the other athletes who put their lives on the line in equally challenging sports. But it does reflect a widespread national view. After winning several gold medals in curling, moguls, bob-sleigh and women’s hockey and Canada moving to 3rd place, the media started highlighting gold again. You wonder if the non-hockey athletes started to think of themselves as means to a higher purpose.

FIXATION ON HOCKEY

The women’s hockey team led by Marie-Philip Poulin grabbed our collective attention when they came from behind to win 3-2 over their U.S. rivals. Meanwhile the men’s team seemed overrated; they just squeezed by Latvia 2-1. The Canadian men were also tested by the Finns, who then went on to humiliate the host-favoured Russians. But then the Finns were defeated by the Swedes who Canada faced in the final after just getting by the U.S. The U.S. was then routed 5-0 by the Finns for the bronze.

And wouldn’t this increasingly level playing field be something to celebrate? Doesn’t it reflect the Olympic spirit? Doesn’t the depth of international hockey make a mockery out of those who treat hockey as a national religion, chanting “Our game, our pride”? It’s presumptuous for any country to think it can “own the podium”. That’s the point of the Olympics.

After the near loss to Latvia the Globe and Mail pointed out the economic irony. The NHL salaries for all the Canadian team members totalled over $150 million while it was well below $1 million for Latvia. The Latvian goalie that stopped 55 shots to 16 going the other way wasn’t even on an NHL team, though that will likely change.

What if Canada had lost the gold to Sweden, who had to play without three of their top-scorers? Would our national identity be fundamentally challenged even though we did so well in other areas and would still have ended up in 3rd place? Why not equally celebrate the women’s hockey victory, after losing four times to the U.S. in world titles? Let’s not forget that female athletes got most of the gold medals in Sochi compared to getting one-third of them in Vancouver. Isn’t getting more equality into sports more fundamental to our collective identity than just winning hockey gold? Or is hockey really our national religion?

VIEW OF SPORTS

There’s really nothing wrong with being fair-minded, “nice” Canadians. And what’s wrong with also seeing Canada as a curling country, for this is the first time ever that women and men from Canada both won gold. We are known for our great figure skating heritage, so why not continue to celebrate Chan, Virtue and Moir for the beauty they brought to the world? Wouldn’t the beauty and exceptional athleticism of the Russian ballet and circus performers during Sochi’s closing ceremony also stir the awe of the most medaled Olympic athletes?

I was struck when after winning gold, men’s curling skip Brad Jacobs encouraged others to take up this sport because it was a good way to “learn about one’s self”. He repeated this; there was no macho hype about winning gold. This was in great contrast to the advice that Don Cherry predictably dished out to millions of Canadians up early to watch the gold hockey game, saying “hit them right off the bat…crash the net”. Thanks for that Don, but there’s no doubt which view of sports deserves a medal for inspiring the next generation of athletes.

Next time I’ll look at how sports may actually be replacing religion.

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Jim Harding PhD
Retired Professor of Environmental and Justice Studies
[ www.crowsnestecology.wordpress.com ]

[Oscar]

Olympic Winter Games have damaging effect on Sochi’s environment

[ http://www.dw.de/olympic-winter-games-h ... a-17449525 ]

February 21, 2014

Conservation groups are criticizing the damage done to Sochi’s environment while the town prepared for the Olympic Winter Games. Many of them are now being harassed and silenced by Russian authorities.

The Olympic Winter Games held in and around the Russian city of Sochi are said to be the most expensive Games in the history of the Winter Olympics. [ http://www.dw.de/sochi-the-most-extrava ... a-17411857 ] Arguably, they are also the Games that have had the biggest impact on the environment.

For years, environmental groups have called for more attention to be paid to the damage done to the region's natural reserves due to the large-scale construction of sports facilities, residential areas, tunnels, roads and railways needed for Sochi to host the Games.

But their pleas were mostly ignored, and many activists were detained or harassed in an attempt to silence them. A lengthy report on the environmental damage caused by the Games preparations was presented earlier this month in Moscow.

MORE:

[ http://www.dw.de/olympic-winter-games-h ... a-17449525 ]

[Oscar]

IS SPORT REPLACING RELIGION? IS THIS A GOOD THING?
Part 2

By Jim Harding R-Town News March 7, 2014

In my last column I asked whether the fixation with winning gold and in particular hockey gold, was in the best spirit of the Sochi Olympics. This relates to a bigger question about what kind of role we want sports to play in upcoming generations.

I am no stranger to sports and don’t judge it from the outside. I played competitive hockey, football and baseball and university level track and basketball. I was a certified basketball referee and coached this sport in Regina’s Church League and YMCA for years.

There are many reasons why people enter sports; I was motivated in part by a desire to overcome childhood asthma. I was raised on the ethic that sport develops social as well as physical skills and is good for character. But it wasn’t any more important than other activities, such as the arts. I was also raised to believe that sports can be inclusive and help build a broader sense of community. There were people in high school that excelled in drama but couldn’t shoot a free throw. There were also those who could shoot a puck but would freeze up in a debater’s competition.

When I grew up any kid who came back to the elementary school grounds after supper was picked to play in scrub baseball. Playing together was more important than winning. At higher levels, sport can teach a lot about ego, pride and shame. It can teach you to not identify too much with winning and to respect the game, including the referees as well as the competitors, especially when they’ve won. Without all of this there would be no game to celebrate. Winning at any cost was not generally promoted, though I had one coach from the U.S. who encouraged us to intentionally foul and try to hurt our skilled opponents. Luckily he was dropped by the next year.

SPORTS AND NATIONALISM

But something is changing. Sport is starting to take on a much greater cultural and national role. It may even be starting to replace religion. And what does that say about both sport and religion? Is sport taking on such an inflated role that it could make us even more dysfunctional in meeting our global challenges?

Certainly sports can bring humanity closer together. But to do this do we need to spend $52 billion at an average of nearly $19 million dollars for each of the 2,800 athletes who competed at Sochi? We know that previous civilizations used sports to engender military patriotism. But is it a good thing that Harper is following in this ancient, pre-democratic tradition? The mass media also privileges hockey as a national religion, although in places like Saskatchewan where there’s no professional hockey, we see how popular the U.S.’s favourite sport, football, can become. But is this Rider Pride just great public fun? Is it yet another version of popular culture? Or is something else happening?

RESEARCH ON FANS

Writing in the November 11, 2009 issue of Psychology Today, evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber noted that sports can have strikingly similar effects on spectators as religion does. Even the vocabularies converge: devotion, faith, dedication, commitment and sacrifice are in sports too. Fans gather in mass arenas to support, even worship their heroes. Clothing, flags and mascots are marshaled in the service of this special collective identity. Anthems can function somewhat as do hymns and the stadium can seem like a cathedral of believers.

Surely such “worshipping” of team victory can’t be compared to the worship of a creator. Yet as church attendance steadily declines, as churches close and congregations die off, larger and larger stadiums continue to be built. Saskatchewan churches are closing at an unprecedented rate while Regina plans for a multi-million dollar new stadium at huge public debt. Might Rider Nation have more dedicated followers than organized religion?

We know that religious identities, like sports identities, can be very symbolic. People can attend the church of their birth without much existential questioning. People can also be born into Rider Nation. And yet surrendering to either identity can be personally transformative, creating opportunities for fellowship which wouldn’t otherwise exist for some. However, emotional group experience and belonging can also be blinding and impersonal when combined with a compulsive desire to win.

In the January 31, 2014 Washington Post, historian Chris Beneke notes that the number of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated more than doubled in the last two decades, while the number who identity as sports fans has also doubled over the last half century to a majority of 60% of the population. Is this simply the upcoming generations looking for new social allegiances as old ones decline, which goes with the shift from rural to urban and from the religious to the secular?

RELIGION IN SPORTS

Beneke also notes that some religiosity has carried over into sports. We’ve all seen born-again athletes who claim that their victory has to do with them being special in the eyes of their God. God apparently picks teams in much the same way God picked countries in time of war. The Public Religion Research Institute also found that half of American sports fans believe that God played a part in the 2014 Super Bowl game. Some prayed for their team, some believed their team was cursed, some thought God was involved in the outcome. One half of Americans believe God rewards faithful athletes with special health and success.

Apparently sport has already taken on religious proportions south of the border. Evangelicals were most likely to inject their religiosity into sports and then Catholics, with Protestants the least likely to link the two. Some theological undercurrents may be showing here.

But might this shift reflect any positive changes in society? Might the growing allegiance to sports reflect the triumph of our earthly pleasures over “pie in the sky” religion? Or might it perhaps reflect a more accessible way for people to dissociate from the trials of everyday life, much the same way as many did with traditional religion? Some might say that sports celebrations are becoming a lot like pagan rituals; certainly the consumption of alcohol during sports events continues to rise. What might this suggest?

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

It is thankfully becoming less acceptable to proselytize fundamentalist religious views. Perhaps people who value or have need of a “righteous” community are turning to sports. With many adherents of the world’s main religions trying to overcome a sense of there being only one view of “God”, institutional religion may be less attractive to some. Ecumenism is somewhat on the rise but so is evangelicalism. But even with realities like soccer violence, isn’t it better to have the “us-versus-them” identity stronger in sports than religion?

But can mass, global sports contribute to our society becoming more spiritually enriching or more democratic? Possibly, if we look at the brotherhood, sisterhood and solidarity of the Olympic experience of both athletes and audiences! But mass sports can take us on another tangent, becoming another way to avoid the painful truths about our unequal and at risk world. It can also be an externalized collective identity to be manipulated for political, economic or other purpose: it already is.
Might those who truly mourn the decline of religion, and not just the decline of their partisan church, now have something in common with those who mourn the turning of sports into something like religion? Stranger things will happen in the quest for a sustainable humanity.

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Jim Harding PhD
Retired Professor of Environmental and Justice Studies
[ www.crowsnestecology.wordpress.com ]