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to liberalism and the market economy. Once again,
therefore, we find ourselves looking at an issue of social
education. If the cult and exercise of pure antagonism
void of all meaning or content other than victory as
an end in itself, as is proper to agonistic sport, made
that the ideal education for Nazi nationalism, as a
pure impulse to domination, and for the conception
of politics, according to Carl Schmitt, as a matter of
“friends or enemies”, then the agonistic mentality
(the “predatory temperament” of the old master Veblen)
that sport teaches and nourishes occupies a central
place in the capacities that allow the individual to
triumph in the free competitive market. And it had to
be the newspaper ABC that, in its issue of 9 July 1996,
pointed out that second and admirable educational
exemplariness of agonistic sport, in a zigzag on
Induráin from which I extract these words: “They say
that the magnificent Navarran cyclist has never been
to the liking of socialism, insofar as that sickly system
always ranted against individual excellence because
it set a ‘bad example’ for its fellow citizens and set
about inventing that ‘engine of history’ which is
‘egalitarian envy’, the best way for nations to end up
going nowhere and exhaust and consume themselves
in their own motionless, dozy mediocrity.”’ The author
of those lines forgot that left-wing regimes have nurtured
mass agonistic sport with no less watchfulness than
the fascist regimes and that not even Fidel Castro
had the elementary decency to withdraw his athletes
from the Olympic Games in Mexico City after the
vile slaughter of left-wing students in the Plaza Mayor,
so valuable did he consider for the prestige of the
state – which was virtually equivalent to his own –
the medals the Cuban champions might manage to
win! Be that as it may, it is no less true that liberalism
can extol the supreme values of agonistic sport for
free market societies, enlightening them with their all
too familiar string of virtues: the will to self-affirmation
and self-fulfilment, the desire to surpass, the aspiration
to excellence, the ardour of competition, the love of
work, the spirit of sacrifice, indifference and resistance
to effort and pain… all of them, in the end, simple
functional perversions that are common to the Hellenic
and Christian cultures or taken from one or the other…
I have always thought it fairly unlikely that the fascistic
essay El origen deportivo del Estado, dated by
Ortega twenty-five years after the publication of the
Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen, could
well have been written deliberately against it. Well, it
was in those very pages by Ortega that I discovered
that the word ‘ascetic’ was taken by Christianity from
the Greek word askesis, which referred to the harsh
training exercises the Greek gymnasts subjected
themselves to to turn their bodies into instruments
of victory. And so there would be some kinship between
the gymnasts of Hellas and the ‘athletes of Christ’ or
‘of the Faith’, even confirmed apparently by certain
practices of the first Christian ascetics, hermits or
especially stylites, who challenged one another in
competitions, for example to see who could last the
longest fasting on top of a column, with only the day
and night for roof and shelter. But those competitions
are merely incidental; the important difference is
that while for the Greek gymnast the body must be
cared for, strengthened and trained as a specialised
instrument for the agonistic function, for the Christian
ascetic it is the ‘beast’ that must be crushed, lacerated
and mortified for the greater freedom of the life of
the spirit, dedicated exclusively to God. However, the
main thing is what remains in common: the appetites
of the flesh and the passions of the soul, ‘disordered’
by definition, must be subdued and repressed like
a despicable mutinous rabble until they have been
subjected to the will and command of the captain,
whether the logos hegemonikos of the stoics or the
ferrule of Christian holiness… Indeed, originally they
would be no more than the ends of mastery of oneself
and contempt for the weaknesses of the soul and the
flesh; the grim self-satisfaction of mastery of oneself
and punishment of one’s own flesh foreshadowed the
furies of domination, just as now it is that evil passion
for victory that feeds the ‘spirit of sacrifice’ of athletes.
And if the church itself has bestowed its blessings
on the ‘Olympic spirit’ of Atlanta, it is because in the
heightened and admired nobility of the ‘spirit of sacrifice’
of the athlete, who subjects his body as if it were his
own race horse to all the punishment and effort required
to carry it to victory, he feels the great moral satisfaction
of glimpsing the old kinship that joins him to the dirty,
resentful self-satisfaction of the flagellant who discharges
on his own body all the hate that has been instilled
in him for the clean joys of the flesh and the warm
recreations of love… ‘And the people, what are they
saying lately?’ someone asked in one of Chumy’s jokes.
And the other one answered: ‘They’re still saying the
same thing: Goooal!’
‘The anguished outcry of the true fanatic – who
brings to sport a notion of what is reverential only to
discover the corruption inside it due to the spread
of the “entertainment ethic” – better illustrates the
degradation of sport than the reservations of the leftwing
critics who aspire to abolishing competition,
highlighting the value of sport as an exercise that
promotes health and provides a more “cooperative”
concept of the activity; who, in other words, want
to make sport an individual and social therapeutic
tool. The previous analysis, however, minimises the
scope of the problem and distorts the cause. In a
society dominated by the production and consumption
of images, no aspect of life can remain immune to
the invasion of spectacle. And the responsibility for
that invasion cannot be attributed to the spirit of
unmasking. It emerges, paradoxically, from the very
attempt to create an autonomous sphere of recreation,
uncontaminated by the world of work and politics.
By their very nature, games are always situated on
one side of working life; nevertheless, they retain an
organic link with the life of the community due to their
capacity to dramatise reality and supply a convincing
representation of community values. The old connection
between game, ritual and public festivities suggests
that although the games take place within arbitrary
boundaries, in spite of everything they are rooted in
shared traditions to which they give objective
expression. Sporting and athletic competitions are a
dramatic footnote to reality, not an escape; a lofty
restaging of community traditions, not a repudiation
of them. Only when games and sport begin to be
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