1There is a considerable literature surrounding the vaunted principles of Olympism. It is frequently asserted that Olympism is a transcultural ideology, a view that emanates from the writings of de Coubertin and that is reproduced by modern advocates and acolytes alike. Its ethical basis is said to rest on “universal fundamental ethical principles.” Yet the very existence of such universal principles has been under attack from moral philosophers who have challenged the ideas that morality is reducible to principles, let alone universal ones. Moreover, there has been strong historical and social critique of the universalism that Olympism embodies, particularly in relation to a criticism of its Eurocentricity. I offer a brief and critical survey of Olympism and challenge the Eurocentric criticism in terms of the genetic fallacy. Finally, in contrast to the idea that “fundamental universal principles” are what underwrite the morality of Olympism, I critically explore the nature and varieties of virtues that might better instantiate the ethical content of the concept.

What Is Olympism ?

2It goes without saying that there is not one account of Olympism but many. I reproduce below the official account of Olympism and then suggest some recently proposed revisions of it (Abreu [1] ; Da Costa [6] ; and Parry [20]) in order to see how they challenge or support the possibility of an Olympism that might properly be thought of as transcultural.

3The preamble to the IOC’s Olympic Charter states the following :

1. Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.

2. The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of man, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.

3. The Olympic Movement is the concerted, organized, universal and permanent action, carried out under the supreme authority of the IOC, of all individuals and entities who are inspired by the values of Olympism. It covers the five continents. It reaches its peak with the bringing together of the world’s athletes at the great sports festival, the Olympic Games. Its symbol is five interlaced rings.

4. The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play. The organization, administration and management of sport must be controlled by independent sports organizations.

5. Any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, gender or otherwise is incompatible with belonging to the Olympic Movement.

6. Belonging to the Olympic Movement requires compliance with the Olympic Charter and recognition by the IOC.2

4How are we to understand these principles in a philosophically justifiable way for the purposes of exploring the moral content of Olympism in general and the idea of the cultivation of Olympic virtues (if such things there are) in particular ? Simply to regard the principles as a list of conditions would not do justice to them. A full appreciation of the principles would require an extended historical, sociological, and political exegesis the like of which I cannot entertain here. Instead, I merely concur with Lamartine Da Costa’s contention that many discussions of Olympism are unacceptably ahistorical. He suggests an alternative framework for understanding the principles as a met narrative. Although he does not articulate in detail how he conceives of this suggestion, he writes in a footnote that a met narrative is a teleological collective reference which subordinates, organizes and accounts for other narratives either in terms of emancipation or speculation. As such sport entities in general and the Olympic Games in particular stand as significant examples of this assumption as far as they create typical heroes, build values and celebrate victories and accomplishments. It is not entirely clear what Da Costa means here. On the one hand, he is alluding to an assumption, but no specific assumption has been highlighted. He notes that there are underlying rationales in terms of “emancipation or speculation,” but these remarks are too elliptical to be of value to the task of enunciating the moral content of Olympism. On the other hand, he depicts central characteristics of the narrative of Olympism. But where is the “meta” characteristic of Olympism as a narrative ? Heroes, values, and victories are indeed central but not necessarily the overarching characteristics of Olympism. It seems that we will do better to understand Olympism by rather more old-fashioned analyses of the concept and its criteria.

5In that vein, and developing on the work of Tavares (26), Abreu (1) very helpfully develops an analytical grid in which to situate and evaluate the conceptions of Olympism presented by Hans Lenk, Juan Antonio Samaranch, Avery Brundage, Jim Parry, and Jeffrey Seagrave. In his methodology, although he does not specifically state it, Abreu rejects essentialism. Following DaCosta’s lead he rejects the idea of an historical essence to the concept of Olympism and adopts a Wittgensteinian approach that looks for similarities and resemblances in the different analyses that the three authors posit. Yet an historical essentialism might be thought to follow if one were to believe such grandiose exhortations as sports utility in bringing about the “the harmonious development of man” (sic) according to “fundamental universal principles” (in a totally nondiscriminatory mode) in order to preserve human dignity. The competing conceptions of Olympism of these authors include, with different emphasis and less than coherent overlaps, the following :

• Sportsmanship/Fair play

• Sport for all/Mass participation

• Sport as education

• Cultural exchange

• International understanding

6How should we understand these five components ? What is their logical status ? One might be forgiven for thinking of them as defining conditions in terms of some conceptual analysis by necessary and sufficient conditions. As we shall see, the concept of Olympism is simply too open textured to admit of that kind of analysis (Weitz, 27). And Wittgenstein’s exhortation that we should not assume that there must be a unity to concepts but rather look and see how they are used in language certainly drives us away from the now ill-reputed move of looking for such conditions (at least) in socially complex and contested concepts (28). Let us for the moment simply label them “persisting” features of the concept of Olympism. This would restrict their status from the logical to the descriptive, allowing that they have merely been claimed to be definitive of Olympism without going into a full-blown analysis of their epistemological significance.

7One aspect to note is that all of these persisting features have important normative dimensions3. Our present focus, however, is on a narrower concern : to extricate the ethical content of the concept that pertains to individual athletes who might be considered Olympic – where this was not taken at a mere descriptive level but rather was illustrative of an ethical ideal – and to explore the criticism that its reach is local and particular as opposed to universal or at least transcultural. It seems clear that from the defining features of Olympism set out above that sportsmanship/fair play and the idea of sports as education are most fruitful. In an attempt to explore their potential to give individual ethical content, we must consider whether they provide sufficiently thick and thin material that has transcultural reach. To do this we will have to answer two questions. First, might the apparent universality of the defining features of Olympism be justified against claims of Euro centricity ? Second, what virtues might justifiably supply the ethical content of Olympism ?

8By way of temporary summary, we might say that although Olympism is a contested concept it is not an essentially contested one. There does appear to be a fairly clear core of persisting and persistently shared features. Although there is direct moral relevance in the claim that sport is a universal right, or that it is an egalitarian or at least nondiscriminatory ideology, that it celebrates the joy of effort, for the purposes of this essay I will focus explicitly on the dimension that is frequently talked of (and reductively so) as the linchpin of sports ethics : the principle of fair play/sportsmanship (or in no gendered language “sportsperson ship”). And I shall take it that this, too, is a rather narrow concept. I want to be more generous in my interpretation of the ethical content of this dimension and discuss its potential structure in the light of virtue ethics.

Is Olympism Eurocentric ?

9It is true that the Olympic Games were developed in the cradle of Western civilization in Ancient Greece along with a bewildering array of intellectual, political, and social institutions. Most of the Olympic sports bear testimony to this heritage. The underlying values and norms of sports, too, are not unaffected by this fact. To what extent might this historical legacy bring with it latent and corrosive biases ? One way is the presentation of these sports and sports cultures and their contrasts with others from beyond their cultural sphere. The representation of “otherness” in Olympic educational materials is brought out nicely by Gomezn (9), who undertakes a semiotic analysis of four Olympic educational programs including the IOC’s (1995) Keep the Spirit Alive : you and the Olympic Games and Be a Champion in Life (IOA 2000). She notes how cultures beyond Europe are represented even by apparently indigenous authors as exotic and immature, in contrast to the developed and mature modernity of Europe. Whether this constitutes Euro centrism – as it is claimed – is another matter. And Gomezn (9) makes no case for it. Instead she seems to label all Western critiques Eurocentric, which seems rather too loose. Clearly what is widely understood as the Western world extends beyond the geographical confines of Europe. Even where, for example, the United States strongly takes its cultural cues from modern Europe, its voices are still polyphonic. Moreover, what the concepts “Europe” or “European” denote is not entirely clear. We still regularly talk of different political and economic constructions after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the velvet revolution of the Czech Republic. So the differences of Eastern and Western Europe cannot simply be glossed over. In a similar vein Northern and Southern Europe are frequently contrasted with each other in relation to cultural, religious, and political criteria. So Euro centrism, though it is a convenient label, is wanting in terms of clear meaning.

10In any evaluation of ethnocentricity, it will be important not to fall into what is called the genetic fallacy. This is the fallacy that the truth or falsity of a given argument or position is a hostage to its genesis or more broadly its history. This kind of move is often made by antiracist or feminist social commentators when they say that a particular sport is a racist or sexist or homophobic one on the basis that its founding fathers had certain objectionable views about women, gays, or persons of color. To be sure Olympism and the Olympic Movement more generally are Western, and European specifically, in their history. Whether it is true that the perspective is therefore perniciously culturally specific is another point and one to be proven, not assumed.

11Might it still be the case that in the ethical formation of Olympism there is an element of Western thought that was culturally exclusive ? Put differently, is there a sense in which the core elements of Olympism set out before might militate against transculturalism or the cultivation of transcultural virtues ? Two features of this view may profitably be examined in detail.

12The first is the idea of sport as education. Despite the widespread reach of the British public (i.e., privately funded) school system throughout the British Empire, it is not difficult to imagine a culture in which sport was simply not viewed under an educational aspect. In early liberal philosophy of education in the English language, the work of Richard Peters (21 ; 22 ; 23) and his collaborator Paul Hirst (10) did much to demolish the English ideal of sport as education in their analyses of the conceptual and epistemological features of education. Equally, Robin Barrow (3) argued that sport may well be thought of as part of schooling (i.e., the socialization that occurred in schools themselves) but not of education, properly conceived as the development of the rational mind. So it seems, even within Anglophone philosophy of education, that there is dispute with the idea that sports are indeed educational and what that might mean. The idea of a Eurocentric concept of sport as education, therefore, is not unproblematic. It follows then that the idea of an exclusive Western or Eurocentric bias cannot get a foothold here. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that if we trawl other non-Western cultures we might very well find competing accounts of the idea that sports educate people in some broader sense over and above their initiation into the respective activities, which would illustrate common ground between what is labeled Eurocentric sport as education with non-Western cultures.

13The second feature worthy of note relates to one of the most difficult questions in moral philosophy. Enlightenment thinkers typically argued for the universality of morality in the form of principled judgments. Typically one can pick out features of the universalistic conception in the idea of Olympism as “respect for fundamental universal principles.” But are there such ? Olympic scholars and administrators blithely talk of “fundamental universal principles” without realizing that their very existence has (a) been questioned for centuries by Western philosophers and (b) not even been conceived of by Eastern philosophers as a credible ethical posture. It is clear that the two families of modern moral philosophy that have dominated proceedings have been universalistic in their scope. Both consequentialist and deontological writings share certain formal properties despite the fact that their defining postures are contradictory. It is true that deontological theories look backward, to considerations known before the fact : to duties, obligations, rights, and so on that override (or ignore) all consequences. Equally, consequentialists look forward the future effects of action that override (or ignore) all considerations that are prior to consequences.

14It is importantly true, however, that consequentialist and deontological theories share structural properties. Moral actions in both deontological and utilitarian writings are captured by judgments that are impartial in application, prescriptive (or action guiding) in nature, and universal in scope. And it is no accident that the regulative rules of sport are a counterpart to these modern moral characteristics. Worse still for the idea of proposing a virtue-based ethic for Olympism is the fact that these structural properties were, in part, designed to counter the biases that seemed to exist in the plethora of competing norms and mores of specific cultures, groups, nations, or tribes. Virtue ethics, it would then be assumed, could not supply the universalism (or at least transculturalism) that Olympism boasts while the prospect for universal moral principles then is met with the skepticism of anthropological data. How, then, might a virtue ethic underwrite the ethical dimension of Olympism ?

Olympism and Virtue Ethics

15Virtue-based theories are described as aretaic because their exposition is often traced back to the Ancient Greeks, for whom virtue, or excellence of character, is translated as areté. The high point of exposition is found in Aristotle, who bases his ethics on practical wisdom supported by the well-disposed and settled set of personality traits that are typically called virtues. There are several points of contrast to be made with modern moral philosophy, but we only need to note here some of the most obvious. The currency of virtue ethics is the character of the person or human agent, which does not reduce to the question “what ought I to do ?” the answer to which bears the hallmarks of impartiality, prescriptivity, and universality. Central among the questions virtue theorists consider salient are issues of “how ought I to live my life ?” and “what kind of person am I to be ?” or “what would my chosen role model feel, think, and do ?” The common moral intuition of moral universality is eschewed by virtue theorists, who are not strongly guided by principles but allow the particular features of a situation to play a determining role in what it is best to do and be. This gives virtue theory an adverbial quality : We admire in, and expect from, sports professionals such traits as “courage,” “cool-headedness,” “honesty,” “integrity,” “truthfulness,” and so on. Even if one acknowledges universal rights or duties or other prescriptions and proscriptions that are to be applied impartially in a given situation, only a person of good character (it is said) ensures praiseworthy action and the avoidance of culpable choices.

16This, of course, leaves virtue theorists open to a charge of inconsistency, over flexibility, or even partiality. How do we know which virtues ought to be elicited in which situations and persons therein ? Moreover, it is true that different societies in different epochs have valued different kinds of traits. Virtue theory, it is said, underdetermines right action and engenders inconsistent actions. It has been suggested by some that one might posit a master virtue to reconcile this difficulty.

17So in the same way that philosophers of sport very often reduce rights and duties to the principle of “respect” so too the virtue theorist could posit that acting “justly,” or “respectfully” or “wisely,” is in the end what is required of good characters, or in this case Olympians. Taking my cue from Aristotle4 and later commentators I will argue that such reductionism is not merely lacking psychological credibility but also damaging to our flourishing as humans in complex social arrangements such as sports.

18I will now sketch an account of the strengths and weaknesses of a nonreductivist account of the ethical potential of Olympism in terms of the cultivation of a range of virtues. In their own way Nussbaum, Rorty, and Pincoffs all attempt to give greater density to the scheme Nussbaumn advances, but it is Nussbaum’s essentialist or nonrelative approach that I will focus more on for the purposes of denying the Euro centricity of the virtues of Olympism.

AVirtue Ethics Approach for Olympism ?

19Following Pincoffs and MacIntyre, I elsewhere discussed a conceptual framework for the acquisition and development of virtues within sporting practices, and I shall not repeat that here5. I merely note its conceptual skeleton. Having set out the MacIntyrean account that could be used to envision sports as moral practices in which our virtues were cultivated when initiated properly into them, I noted four significant problems that I feel others (such as Peter Arnold or Angela Schneider) had overlooked in pressing MacIntyre’s theory into the service of sports philosophy and sports education. These were (a) the clarity of the distinction between practices such as sports and the bureaucratic institutions such as National Olympic Committee’s or the IOC itself that tend simultaneously to support and corrupt sports ; (b) the manner in which the individual is overtaken by social considerations ; (c) MacIntyre’s reductivism, which appears to depict three virtues as central while ignoring the functional variety of the virtues ; and (d) the too-sharp distinction between internal and external goods. It should be clear that my concern here does not centrally relate to (a) and (c), and although (b) has some relevance for a proper consideration of hero worship of Olympian athletes, I intend to focus on the second consideration in an attempt to critically consider the kinds of virtues that might furnish Olympism with a credible transcultural ethical basis.

20But if we were trying to follow the idea that sport’s ethical merit was centrally in the cultivation of virtue, either generally or specifically in relation to Olympism, or if we wanted to begin to sketch what an Olympic education might look like in virtue-theoretical terms, we should take seriously Pincoffs’ peroration that inspired point (c) : Avoid reductivism. Although I cannot offer here a completed scheme or catalogue of the virtues, I think it would be an advance on bland exhortations to virtuous conduct to at least begin to delineate the different sorts of virtues that could instantiate Olympism in athletic conduct.

21Now this appears to be a simple conceptual move, but that is a misperception. The point begs a core question in the ethics of virtue. Plato asked long ago whether virtue was one or many. Many recent ethicists argue that the Platonic thesis that all virtue displays a certain unity or coherence is mistaken. The catalogue of all virtues is functionally various. As Pincoffs argues against MacIntyre, rather than tying virtues to the internal goods of practices such as sports, we should simply consider the extent to which we prefer people to have rather than not to have these character traits. Taking these cues it would seem that a helpful place to start would be to distinguish what could be called the no instrumental virtues from the instrumental virtues. In doing so we can then identify those that relate specifically to elite sports, in which the sphere is essentially instrumental, goal-oriented action (albeit within a regulative formal and informal rule framework).

22What does this mean ? Well, in the first instance we might want to insist on a range of virtues that secured more than is minimally reasonable interpersonal conduct based loosely on a core human value of not harming others. It may seem reasonable to claim that these moral virtues be the most likely contenders for Olympic virtues since they are most likely to have a transcultural reach. The key features of such a list would include candidates such as fairness, honesty, integrity, and trustworthiness. Who would dispute these from the list of virtues expected of an Olympian (or anyone else for that matter), even though we might neither expect it nor find it in other elite sports arenas ? Consider the 2006 World Cup in professional football (i.e., soccer). Never have World Cup spectators witnessed so much deception and simulation (faking injury to gain a strategic penalty and potential removal of the opposition player from the game). In elaborating the virtues of an Olympian we might wish to incorporate much higher than moral minimalism. The persisting ideal of Olympians as honorable heroes would be sullied were they to take on so callous or cavalier an attitude to the constitutive and regulative rules of sports, the best traditions of those sports, and the standards of honesty and integrity we properly expect of (handsomely paid) professionals, as the players of this tournament have. In a recent comment on the cheating of the Frenchman Thierry Henry, one of the most gifted players of his generation, the British journalist Hugh MacIlvanney hinted at Shakespeare’s remark on the repulsive power of beauty gone bad. He did not relate the remark to the idea of role-modeling obligations of Olympians, but it is apposite. In Sonnet XCIV Shakespeare wrote, the summer’s flower is to the summer sweet, though to itself, it only live and die, but if that flower with base infection meet, the basest weed outbraves his dignity : For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds ; Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds. The beautiful game (as football is called) has this year looked anything but beautiful. And it is some of its technically finest players who have rendered it so. Why should professional soccer not look like any other elite sports sphere, one might ask ? Without attempting to vilify unjustifiably one of the many Olympic scoundrels whose vices have corroded the ideals of Olympism, one thinks readily of Ben Johnson. There are others such as the ice skater Tonya Harding, who conspired with an associate to club her rival American opponent Nancy Kerrigan6. The former is chided more for the fact that he actually occupied the winner’s rostrum, whereas the latter’s heinous act was exposed before the competition. An important merit of this exposure was that the athletic excellence of the legitimate competitors was not publicly bested by an inferior opponent, one who shared the contest but under substantially superior conditions of preparation.

23One difficulty for Olympic athletes is the thought that they be publicly held to account for higher standards of conduct and character than the general public. A corresponding philosophical difficulty would be the precise content given to the virtues that would underwrite the idea of positive, perhaps heroic, role models ? To mirror the title of one of MacIntyre’s books, Whose Justice should count ? Which conception of justice is to be preferred ? Similarly, as I have written elsewhere, trust is a basic virtue in all forms of social and political order, but the shape of trust under liberal individualism is much different from that of a communitarian. And it strikes me that liberal humanism is indeed the underlying political ideology of Olympism. Here is perhaps the greatest obstacle to the idea of an Olympic ethic that was global in reach : How transcultural could such a list be ? How would it cohere with more traditional social orders such as exist in many parts of the globe?7 I hope to address this problem in the next section when I set out some Olympic virtues that flow from the very structure of Olympic sports.

24A second conceptual problem emerges from other candidates in Pincoffs’ list of the moral virtues. In a way that establishes the moral virtues as safeguards to no harming of others he lists “no recklessness,” “no negligence,” “no vengefulness,” “no belligerence,” and “no fanaticism” as mandatory. Some of these do not present problems for those who wish to cultivate Olympism as a universal narrative for moral education. Administrators timing marathon running are negligent (if not downright corrupt) when they schedule Olympic races in the heat of the day. Gymnast coaches who fail to check the safety of high bars in their training and cause injuries are acting viciously – albeit in negligent form. Team managers who send out partly concussed footballers back onto the field of play or who manipulate the team doctor into passing an injured player as fit to compete are similarly acting in immoral ways. But given the instrumental character of sport, might we admire the belligerence of an athlete who persisted in the face of the odds and come to common consensus that his or her way of approaching training or competition was indeed the right way ? Equally, what do we say to Olympians who sacrifice their future health for the gold medal and the glory that attaches to it ? Can we mandate their prudence as Brown (5) argues ? Well, I think we can, but the price of arguing in this way is to commit oneself to a very particular conception of the self and social order – one that may very well be at odds with the absolute perfectionism we associate with Olympism. Finally, what might be meant by “no vengefulness” – isn’t revenge for past defeats a central (necessary ?) motivation for Olympic excellence ? As a matter of fact it surely is. As a matter of principle we can question whether this ought to be so. But in so doing we should be careful, as Flanagan notes, not to attempt to construct a moral theory that human beings cannot reasonably aspire to. Setting out a clear account of the desirability of the boundaries of human conduct, as Fraleigh tried to do, is a perilous endeavor if one wants something other than a purified account of rules of conduct.

25Before moving to the other parts of Pincoffs’ no instrumental scheme of virtues, it is worth noting examples of his no mandatory moral virtues. He cites examples such as altruism, benevolence, super conscientiousness, and super honesty. One of the chief moral educational powers of sport is, I suggest, in the role modeling of Olympians who engage in the kinds of behaviors where, against the grain of direct competition, they act in ways that are selfless (such as assisting fellow athletes who are injured or deliberately eschewing easy opportunities to win at the expense of incapacitated opponents) or super honest where they indicate to an official that they have broken a rule when the official had not realized it. This is where the Olympian nature of their conduct is apparent ; the Olympians historically enjoyed a higher status than common mortals. Despite the myth that champions won only olive wreaths we know, to the contrary, that they were paid handsomely in the Ancient games. Clearly many, and perhaps most, people would seek to gain fair and unfair competitive advantage with such extreme financial and social motivation. The fact that, with so much to win or lose, by far most athletes ignore opportunities to cheat is one reason that we properly think of them as above everyday folk.

26Having considered some conceptual and theoretical difficulties with the idea of moral virtues for Olympism, I want briefly to consider what is central to Pincoffs’ scheme that might be a rich source for an elaboration of Olympic virtues. Pincoffs notes that the instrumental virtues are the easiest aspect of the classification of virtue. They are also central to an elaboration of sports virtues generally, and the virtues of Olympism specifically. Consider then the category of what he calls “meliorating” virtues. In any society there will be disputes as to the benefits and burdens of human association. Likewise, in sports there may well be consensus as to the proper objectives to be sought8. But even where these are shared, the goals of competition will necessarily be contested by other Olympians. Pincoffs suggests under the class of meliorating virtues three separate categories : (a) mediating virtues (such as tolerance and reasonableness), (b) temperamental virtues (such as humorousness, even-temperedness, and no vindictiveness), and (c) formal virtues (such as decency, modesty, and politeness). I think this is absolutely the right way to proceed. And note that there is at least a posturing toward these meliorating virtues in the fourth principle of Olympism, which states that given the right to practice sport it should be done in a certain Olympic manner that “requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play” (24 : p. n). What is this if not an appeal to that tolerance and reasonableness that are the basis of a pluralism undeniably represented in the multicultural festival that is the games – however much the sports themselves have a largely Western basis in historical terms ? My point here is simply that no matter where one lives one will be confronted by alterity or otherness, in the pursuit of either shared goals or mutually exclusive ones. This fact, which flows from the structure of sports (at a conceptual level), places demands on the very characters of sportspersons. Note that I am not saying that the presence of contrary vices is not everywhere to be seen in sport but that for it to reach the ideals captured in Olympism, the vices thus must be cultivated. Indeed, the point can be distilled from a most general level. Nussbaum puts it this :

The point is that everyone makes some choices and acts somehow or other in these spheres : if not properly then improperly. Everyone has some attitude and behavior toward her own death ; toward her own bodily appetites and their management ; toward her property and its use ; towards the distribution of social goods ; toward telling the truth ; toward being kindly or not kindly to others ; toward cultivating or not cultivating a sense of play and delight ; and so on. No matter where one lives one cannot escape these questions, so long as one is living a human life.

Nussbaum’s claim here is the noble and expansive one of unifying all good human living under the same canopy of virtues. I am staking out a much more modest claim. I am merely suggesting that Olympic sports, because of the very nature and purpose of their social sphere, will place similar demands on all Olympians. There, responses are obligatory in nature (through rule structures and conventions) but still challenging because of our weakness of will and the ready availability of (more or less substantial) external goods. Competition within and between individuals and teams heightens the stakes. The virtues, in their variety, are a response to this problematic.

27In argument one might raise the same conceptual objection with respect to the interpretation or instantiation of these virtues in concrete and differing national cultural contexts. Consider the modesty and politeness of the sumo wrestler with the brash arrogance of so many professional basketball and soccer players. One can find an easy case for the preference of the former over the latter. But one must also ask the question, does decency (or modesty or politeness) vary from one sporting context to another ? What sense can one make of politeness in the Olympic boxing ring ? Happily, these are fine-grained questions for another day9. Yet it is worth nothing that a similar problem besets Pincoffs’ final category. His aesthetic virtues are composed of two lists : noble and charming. The latter seem to have little place in Olympic contexts : “liveliness,” “whimsicality,” and “vivaciousness.” Yet the aesthetic sports such as gymnastics or diving might well celebrate “gracefulness.” And in other, purposive, sports such as hockey or sailing we still admire the elegance of skilled action. Although we must be careful to avoid gender bias in looking for the grace in women’s sports rather than men’s, we have to avoid the opposing bias of looking for stereotypes of nobility in male sport. One can see the value of MacIntyre’s list of virtues for the Ancient Greek warrior class (we might easily add the samurai here), where one thinks of the comportment of great leaders who, under the most intense pressure, display “dignity,” “virility,” “magnanimity,” “serenity,” and “nobility.” Despite, however, the militarist-masculinist backgrounds of these virtues we can still accept their role in the cultivation of virtue.

28As has been noted, there is little difficulty setting out the kinds of virtues that we might expect to cultivate in sports and sports teams. I note both of these categories in order to reflect those virtues that belong to groups, as well as individuals. While it is fairly obvious that one would need virtues such as discipline, determination, persistence, and tenacity, as an Olympian (no less, it must be said, than as businesswomen, fathers, or teachers) one would also need “courage,” “prudence,” and “strength.” It might be helpful to recognize again the potential competitiveness of different virtues in addition to heterogeneity even within virtues such as courage. There are at least two faces of courage : the active and the passive. The conception of courage that dominates in sports journalism would be the active kind : courage as the capacity to face danger in the pursuit of one’s valuable goals. Think of the ice hockey goalkeeper who dives at the feet of the oncoming striker about to flick the puck at close range. Consider the gymnast who executes a new move in an Olympic final when the skill is not yet grooved and entails several twisting somersaults during a vault. What of the coach who rejects the aging hero in favor of a bold selection of an exciting youth ? These are all examples of active courage. Others sometimes call moral courage the ability to withstand harmful events or not to give in to them. A beautiful example would be found in the caring for a terminally ill loved one : where one never gave into a sentimental attitude, one never indulged in fits of weeping in front of the loved one for fear of dragging them down too, where one remained “strong for them” as we say. It is less easy to find examples of such courage in sport except, say, in the recovery from injury or illness to compete. I am thinking of the magnificent example of Lance Armstrong. Notwithstanding the hyperbole of his autobiography, one cannot help but be moved by his resoluteness in the face of cancer and his painstaking rebuilding of his body to recover normal functioning and then on to heroic greatness as the six-time winner of the Tour de France. But the philosophical problems do not end here. I am reminded of the U.S. female gymnast Kerri Strugg, who completed her last vault in the Atlanta Olympics with a badly injured ankle in order to register sufficient points to secure a team gold. Here we can see the competition of virtue in contrast to the Platonic account of the harmony of virtue. Ought one to risk possibly irreparable damage to one’s ankle now in one’s youthful years and then reap the reward of osteoarthritis over many decades to come in the future ? Put simply, ought courage to triumph over prudence ? It strikes me that this particular clash is one that runs right through the generations of Olympic athletes and coaches in their pursuit of absolute sporting excellence.

29There may be many points that we can take from this examination of the functional variety of the classification of virtues relevant to the assignation “Olympic.” I shall note merely two. First, it would be unreasonable to select a catalogue from the no instrumental virtues and expect all sports or even Olympic sports to cultivate them. Just as the virtues are functionally various, we must also recognize the enormous variety of sports and the radically different challenges they pose to contestants. Archery, basketball, hockey, judo, sailing, swimming, and track and field all share a competitive logic and a certain winning mindset. But this mindset is surely not a virtue but rather a compendium of virtues that are to some extent open ended. We can expect a much greater shared approach in relation to the instrumental virtues, but even here there will be some context specificity, which may lead to alternative interpretations of those virtues.

30Second, a pedagogical point follows this philosophical one. Relatively few, if any, of these virtues have ever been targeted specifically in the policy documents and curricular outlines of coaches, physical education teachers, and sport pedagogues, in my limited experience. Yet in the UK at least, home to the Victorian legacy of moralistic sports and the muscular Christianity that so inspired de Coubertin, it was always thought that somehow, magically, the very playing of sports would inculcate in its practitioners moral qualities we think of as virtues. Nothing, it strikes me, warrants such confidence in amateur sport, let alone Olympian encounters.

31This may appear to the modern reader as archaic psychological determinism out of place in the modern world. Indeed it seems such a conclusion is not difficult to read into the insightful work of Honda (11), who tracks the development of kendo in Japan. He argues that Japanese youth have rejected a traditional conception of kendo as “budo” in favor of a version of the activity (sport kendo) that is easier to access and succeed in relation to Western sporting criteria but wherein much of the beauty and difficulty of the activity, along with its highly hierarchical traditions, has been lost10. It could be said, as indeed it has been of MacIntyre, that the philosopher or pedagogue attempting to establish a singular ethics of Olympism is harking back to a bygone age. There is some truth in this claim. Oddly, perhaps even paradoxically, the survival of Olympism as an ideology may well rest not on laissez faire liberalism but instead on its preservation in the form of a social practice in contrast to the modern idioms of individualism and liberal pluralism that it espouses. So, without some kind of conserving traditions it may be difficult to foresee Olympic sport, whose best traditions Olympism tries to preserve, within liberal humanism. But this is only a perverse thought. I cannot offer an argument to sustain it here.

Final Remarks

32I have tried to offer an account here of the moral content of the much-discussed concept of Olympism. I have articulated the outline of certain competing conceptions of Olympism and, in contrast to explicit claims about its being based on universal principles, I have sketched a catalogue of virtues that might inform and sustain that ideology. I noted that one of the enduring powers of Olympic sport, which finds its home in Aristotle’s virtue ethics, is the concept of a role model. Much more needs to be said about how not just athletes but also our sports administrators, coaches and officials, and sports scientists and sports medics, themselves, embody and display the full catalogue of virtues that celebrate Olympism : sport at its best. But the tensions between the local and global are twofold and need to be recognized as such before this project develops. We must realize that sports cultures or ethoses vary from sport to sport and within the sports themselves as practiced in different cultures and continents. Roland Renson has helpfully coined the term “glocalization” to recognize the need for the local and the global to be harmonized in sport. I have tried, in the sketch of instrumental and no instrumental virtues, to begin to explore these possibilities within the cultivation of the virtue ethics of Olympism11.