Soviet-style Sports Suck?
I suspect that our presentday sports culture is a foreign/recent implant.
Basically, in the mid-70’s the USSR & Friends started dominating world sport. Everyone was taken by surprise. The recipe for success was secret. Then it wasn’t. —Soviet tricks leaked out. Basically that was the start of presentday Sports Science. The concept of heartrate training, interval training and childhood talent ID—the whole nine yards (and drugs)—came from behind the Iron Curtain. Of course this is just my vague conclusion from having read sports lit since then.
The USSR used sport to boost social morale at home. But it seems that nowadays sports science often becomes COMPLETELY CUT APART from traditional cultural concerns…and has become its own culture. (Indurain has a 32bpm! And 30 sec max rate recovery period! Plus 6L lungs! Panache? What’s panache? Sure, his politeness was talked about—but what was more impt?)
In sports before science, talent showed up by surprise, manifested itself in character and panache, then disappeared leaving only a statue in the hometown park.
Maybe the Marxist Materialization of sport was inevitable. But I think it helps to know where it came from and why it was developed in the first place. And that if one doesn’t have a material worldview, one can happily drop any unnatural preference for numbers, statistics, programs, results. Even if one is materialist, it can help to remember that the performance wasn’t for itself, but was for the improvement of social morale (a kind of nonmaterialist function).
So you can still be a great cyclist without any over-reliance on science. The true purpose and benefits of sport predates sports science and includes it. The purpose wasn’t just results even for the Soviets—the purpose was to increase social morale. (It’s easy today to develop a feeding frenzy for performance without social morale being improved one iota. That’s a sign of the loss of roots.)
