>> Sport, in general, is about the quest for excellence. Is it, really? It feels like it's a business and a spectacle, a form of entertainment not fundamentall

>> Sport, in general, is about the quest for excellence. Is it, really? It feels like it's a business and a spectacle, a form of entertainment not fundamentally different than cinema or theater, except that it lays claim to being "about the quest for excellence". A claim that unfortunately is hard to support in view of how common is doping, for instance, or how common is violence around football matches. Today's sport is very different than e.g. the ancient Greeks' Olympic games which were an event held in honour of a god (Apollo) that very few people still worship today. The Olympic were also a sex- and race-segregated event (only Greek free men could take part) so even for that period, maybe sport was about "excellence", maybe it was about something else. The Nazis were certainly quite ready to embrace the Olympics. A certain totalitarian, eugenicist ideology is never very far from sport. Sports and games, and "noble competition" seems to have been a universal, though. I'm thinking for example of the Afghan national sport, Buzkashi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzkashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buzkashi