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Olympic Ethics and Philosophy: Old Wine in New Bottles

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 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 people’s 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 ‘rearticulate’ 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 Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 6, No. 2, May 2012