Is Sport failing youth
On Wednesday 5 May 2021, Vincentians learnt of the gruesome shooting death of
26-year-old, Curtis ‘Lopez’ McFee.
McFee was a former student of the St Vincent Grammar School and later, of the St Vincent Community College.
The young man was also a track and field athlete and football with immense sporting talent that was never taken seriously to positively impact his development.
On Friday 21 May 2021, this country’s sporting fraternity lost another individual in the personage of Dwaine ‘Tall Man’ Sandy, aged 32 years, the lead goalkeeper of Vincy Heat, the national senior football team for the past few years. Sandy was gunned down in the presence of his girlfriend while at a shop in Calliaqua.
Over the past several years we have had the spectre of athletes in one sport or another falling victim to violence.
Not so very long ago we heard of the slaying of an athlete after practising his sport, football, in Kingstown. Knowing that he was targeted, he hastily ran to take a passenger van only to have the vehicle stop for gas at the pump near the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital. The murder was committed, literally slew the young footballer while he was in the passenger van before the frightened passengers.
It was on 3 July 2017 that footballer, Roy ‘Chicken’ Richards, lost his life at the Milton Cato Memorial Hospital, from gunshot wounds sustained in Barrouallie.
We are left to ponder what has gone wrong in Vincentian society when we hear of so many individuals being murdered. We are aware that it is not only sportspeople who are the victims. This country has been having significantly large numbers of murders each year for a considerable period of time with no seeming end in sight.
Already, with five months completed, this country has already recorded 17 murders.
The fact that we have athletes being violently killed here at home must be cause enough for us to seriously reconsider whether or not sport has actually failed them and the wider Vincentian society and is perhaps incapable of living up to the lofty expectations so well enunciated by the international sporting organisations around the world.
Sport and values in antiquity
Writers have always sought to link participation in sport to positive values. However, closer analysis compels us to review this outlook.
Importantly we need to ask ourselves whether or not it was the case that the writers wanted sport to play a particular role in society, more to suit the needs of those already in positions of influence and power in society. The rationale for this question is the fact that even in antiquity, there were clear prejudices evident in sport and these were officially imposed by those in authority at the time.
In Ancient Greece, the lower classes and women were not allowed to compete. The Ancient Olympics were for the ‘better’ classes of Greek society. This was outright discrimination since it endorsed a world view that women and lower class men were of no consequence to the development of the very society in which they were born and raised.
It was also the view that intellectuals could only emerge from the elite classes, a perception that pervaded European society for centuries and was extended through the period of European expansionism across the world. The lower and under classes were thought so inferior that they could not possibly rise to the occasion in respect of academia, but they were incapable and unworthy of participating in sport alongside male members of the higher classes.
Rather than give rise to social equality, the Ancient Olympics served the interests of the upper and ruling classes by further guaranteeing their already entrenched beliefs in their own superiority and misguided sense of righteousness and entitlement.
Sport and values in the Olympic Movement
In examining the history of the Olympic Games, it was discovered that there were several initiatives taking place around the world where individuals were envisioning the importance of re-introducing the Olympic Games.
While de Coubertin is credited with being the man at the forefront of the establishment of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympic Games and the International Olympic Movement, not enough credit has been given to others, like Soutsos, the Greek, William ‘Penny’ Brookes of the UK and others who had already been engaged in a similar line of thought.
However, in each instance, the idea was not necessarily to engage the masses.
It is always the case that social institutions in any historical period inevitably reflects the status of the society then. That was the case at the time in 1894 when the IOC was formed. De Coubertin and the others who met at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, were representative of the existing social order and circumstance. They seized the moment but established an institution that they thought would be a response to what they perceived as the ills of modern society at the time.
The values of the Olympic Movement, as enunciated by de Coubertin and his successors through time, have always been reflective, more of the wishes of the upper and ruling classes than of the entire societies. This may well be the reason that amateurism, an upper-class concept, ruled the early, formative years of the modern Olympic Movement and Games. The same can be said by way of explaining the Movement’s resistance to the involvement of women.
The ‘cause’ espoused and promoted by the Movement remained essentially elitist for decades and perhaps, on closer analysis, is still the same today.
Jim Thorpe, American Indian, ran afoul of the existing social and Olympic-defined social order and hence was banned. Several decades later, Jesse Owens received the same sanction.
The Olympic Movement, filled with principles and values, did not concern itself with the causal factors that led Thorpe and Owens to their sporting choices, but it nonetheless imposed sanctions upon them for those choices.
There may well be reason to believe that the decision to open the Olympics to professional athletes was driven, more by the economic benefits to be derived from them, than any other single factor.
The leaders of the Olympic Movement may do well to suggest to the international sporting fraternity that its resources are used to facilitate a number of good ‘causes’, as a justification for the way it engages in sport. Analysis of the procedures for determining membership of the exclusive club that is the IOC remains consistent with the traditions forged in the Olympics of Antiquity – dictated by and favouring the upper classes.
The foregoing analysis may well be applicable to the major international sports bodies that have been established through time.
Sport’s dark underbelly
What exists today as global sport remains decidedly elitist. Regardless of how each of the major sports of today started, they have evolved into capitalistic dynamos.
The IOC has had its share of chronic corruption and, on each occasion, found ways to give the impression of having re-invented itself. The same can be said of numerous international federations (IF) like football, cycling, boxing, to name a few.
Athletes have found novel ways of understanding the modus operandi of the major sporting bodies, everywhere. They are increasingly aware of the politics in and of sport and the ultimate importance of the financial bottom-line to the determination of ‘success’.
Athletes have come to realise that at the end of the day, sporting bodies place financial viability over and above everything else. Like the leaders of sport, increasingly we have athletes striving to use sport as a career pathway and not necessarily as a mechanism to facilitate growth in integrity and morality, to say nothing of humanity.
While Mandela would have been eager to see sport as facilitating growth in man’s humanity, his own South Africa has not exactly emerged as the model of racial equality that he was hopeful for. He would have been saddened by the revelations of the monies that the South African football authorities claim to have passed on to others in the name of a so-called African Diaspora football development fund.
FIFA does not yet appear to have seriously investigated when such an institution was established, by whom, and who were the beneficiaries of the monies disbursed. It may well be that the organisation opted for the easy way out – leave it alone.
FIFA continues to rake in millions from its immensely popular competitions even where systemic racism only meets with a paltry slap on the wrist of the offenders. The sport is bigger than the very athletes whom they daily declare as the reason for their existence.
In sport, the success stories are those athletes who have emerged financial champions as a result of their dominance in the competition arena. It is perhaps the athletes’ understand of this reality that allowed Lance Armstrong to wield his own web of deceitful blood doping for so long while marketing himself as an exemplar of a cancer-infected athlete defeating the illness while defying the performance odds.
Armstrong gave an excellent example of just how much sport fails to facilitate the social transformation of the individual athlete and hence of society.
The likes of LeBron James and Lewis Hamilton, provide examples of how people can emerge from the disenfranchised social classes to excel in their respective sport and use their successes to challenge the status quo in the very sporting institutions that they dominate. The global reaction to their protestations has not been any different from what obtained when athletes seek to challenge the sports authorities and their established order over centuries.
The media, in their often twisted eagerness to access profit, have often joined forces with the sporting authorities to chastise successful sportspeople who dare to challenge the existing social order in sport.
Increasingly, athletes are understanding how sport is really played and by whom.
Interestingly, the response of the English football fans to the launch of the European Super League (ESL) served to highlight the fact that, like the athletes, the fans have also gotten on to the dynamics of sport and the real ‘cause’ of those who wield ownership and control in their own collective best interest.
It has always been the case in sport that those who own and control the international organisations abrogate unto themselves the ‘right’ to dictate the norms of behaviour of the athletes. More often than not, such norms are those of the upper classes and the behaviours they chastise and presented as those of the ‘unschooled and untutored’ and/or ‘possessive of a sort of learned helplessness’.
As long as international sport continues to reflect the inequality and prejudices of the societies in which they exist they will continue to fail successive generations of youths. The few success stories have little impact on the masses of youths across the world.
