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RATHBONE: Does sport really warrant our reverence?

9th February, 2015
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ACT Brumbies' Clyde Rathbone celebrates with teammate Joe Tomane (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)
Expert
9th February, 2015
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When I hung up my boots in August last year I was immediately presented with the same question all athletes are eventually forced to answer:

“What now?”

The first thing to notice about being “In retirement” is that it feels a lot like work. The second observation is that new ventures often prove a useful vantage point for reflection. So with my boots now riddled with cobwebs perhaps this is the right time to think about sport.

Professional sport tends to be all-consuming. It requires years of dedication and sacrifice just to get to the beginning of a career. From there athletes are thrust onto a treadmill that only has one setting — go faster. Competition at the elite levels of sport creates a situation in which more is continually demanded from athletes able to give less. More money comes with strings attached: more games, more training, more travel, more injuries, more sponsor commitments, and less time, much less time.

Less time means athletes today have less opportunity for personal growth. In the 12 years I spent as a professional athlete the demands on players escalated enormously. A decade ago we would often arrive for training at around 9:30am, be home before lunch and then back again at 2:30pm for the afternoon field season. The working day for a Brumby now begins at 7am and often doesn’t end until well after 5pm. The intensity and physicality of the training has also followed a significant upward curve and I suspect that the current model is unsustainable.

There are a number of problems with the sporting landscape as it currently is. The first is the obvious opportunity cost. All the time dedicated to sport cannot be spent elsewhere. This may sound obvious, but it’s a vital consideration for the young men and women considering life as a professional athlete. A mountain of books go unread and a treasury of interesting conversations remain unspoken in all the time spent training and recovering.

Looking back on my own career and weighing all the above it’s difficult to know if I would seriously advise a young person to pursue a career as an elite athlete.

I always felt conflicted by my own place in sport. I loved elements of it, the camaraderie, competition and the purity of outcomes that sport provides. I love that sport delivers a weekly dose of performance-related empirical evidence.

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On any given Saturday you’re either good enough or you are not, and the reasons for success or failure are usually clear. In a world where fooling oneself is all too easy I appreciated working in an environment that punished ignorance. Or rather, punished some ignorance, some of the time.

Conversely, I never learnt to love all of the game. I found much of the training incredibly tedious. And while I understand long hours spent repeating drills is a necessary part of the job, I could never quite convince myself that it was the best use of my time.

I also began to question the role of professional sport in our society. The conventional narrative suggests that elite sport is a vital part of our culture.

But does it really warrant the reverence it has been afforded? Am I complicit in a system that plays a significant role distracting us from what really matters? It’s not within the scope of this column to answer these questions but I can say that I’m not the blindly confident advocate of sport that I once was. Perhaps I’ve been immersed in sport for too long to romanticise it.

Neither am I about to reject the fact that sport can enhance lives and improve societies. I just think it does this far less, and far less effectively, than is widely assumed. And I’d like us all to really interrogate the impact — positive and negative — that sport has on our lives.

For every child that learns about teamwork and discipline there are children for whom sport is their first brush with stupidity and oppression. For every rags to riches tale of triumph over adversity that corporations and governments love to propagate, there is a catalogue of crushed trust and broken hearts.

Because sport is people. I’ve had emotionally intelligent and deeply empathetic coaches, and cripplingly shallow megalomaniacal ones. I’ve had teammates that consistently embodied qualities we can all celebrate, and I’ve had others who made me embarrassed to call myself an athlete.

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Sport is a tool. And like all tools its utility is governed by those who use it. I think it’s worth asking if sport is really as virtuous as so many of us believe.

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