It’s time to ditch the old cliches and to change the way we think about Olympic athletes, who are humans rather than robotsChris Boardman signalled the shift when he summed up British Cycling’s performance at the Tokyo Olympics: “Fewer medals but a better story.” What could he mean? We all know sporting performance pushes forward. Innovation never stops as athletes look deeper and search further to raise their game. The new territory this time is fresh vocabulary, human stories and different thinking.The Paralympics are poised to begin, the Beijing Winter Olympics follow next year, with Paris 2024 not so far away. Olympians of different ages and from different nations are challenging us to shift our mindsets and broaden the lens...
Top-level athletes are, by definition, unusual but the very best will have an unlikely advantage over their siblingsWinners come second. Or third, even fourth. Just usually not first. I’m talking about birth order: where you fit into the run of your siblings. That’s the takeaway from Mind Games, a new book by Annie Vernon, best known at the Guardian and Observer for a short work placement she did here in 2015, though in the wider world she perhaps has greater fame as a world champion rower who won a silver medal at the 2008 Olympics.Mind Games sets out to unpick what it is about top‑level athletes that makes them different. For Vernon it’s mostly mental. “You have to be unbelievably,...
The obsessive pursuit of impressive but empty accomplishments gives cause for psychological concernThere’s a hoary old debate about what constitutes a sport as opposed to a pastime or an activity. Is darts, for example, a sport? Angling? Mountaineering? There are all manner of ways of answering the question that are to do with codification, exertion, competition. But ultimately, particularly for participants, sharp lines of definition probably seem rather arbitrary.In recent years those intense activities that were once deemed to lie beyond the borders of sport have been granted a new and inclusive designation: extreme sports, a group where you’ll find such diverse enterprises as cave diving, free climbing and base jumping. Each to his own, even if, to borrow Nabokov’s...
The Boat Race and University Challenge are both being dominated by postgraduates yet used to be about the nation admiring the strength and knowledge of young peopleNo one watching University Challenge lately will have overlooked the presence of Jason Golfinos. He’s the man who knows everything. He knows about Praxiteles and Benny Goodman, about Winston Churchill’s speeches and video games. He’s American and he tends to celebrate a moment of knowledge-based triumph with a fist-bump.He graduated from Princeton two years ago and now he’s doing his master’s in Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Darwin College, Cambridge, a post-graduate college where they don’t teach anyone you would immediately identify on the street as a university student. His three teammates, all...