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De: F. Pacheco Torgal
Enviado: 15 de Fevereiro de 2018 8:05
Assunto: Another relic of the XX century that academia does not need
Competitive sports are just a die-hard relic of the XX century but
the most bizarre thing is that Universities fell into the temptation to please a
rising sports market and as a consequence sports performance has even become a
science worth university status.
Competitive sports are just something that comes from a past of
survival, of competition to the death, of winners and losers, of us versus
them. Of race improvement and eugenics. Of males fighting each other in order
to be able to mate with as many females as possible to pass their
"superior" genes. That´s a narrative that we do not need in the 21st
century. Even Olympic games make no sense in the 21st century because the heroes
(the role models) of this century ought to be those that help Humanity to solve
their many and worrying problems, not those that spend thousands of hours
training in or order to be the human that runs faster, jumps higher or that
throws a heavy object to a longer distance. That´s nothing more than a
meaningless and unsustainable waste of resources.
To make things even worse let´s not forget that for instance sports teams
in the Universities in the US have a long record of scandals including forging the
grades of thousands of students, match-fixing, you name it. The recent
Nassar scandal is a very good example of how a university's reputation can be
tainted by such connections. The simple fact that highly competitive sports are
now more and more associated with the doping industry and the multimillion-rising
match-fixing would be reason enough for universities to avoid such a dark area.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roomykhan/2017/12/31/doping-in-sports-cheating-or-leveling-of-the-playing-field/#42ced36c75ec
If the work of the intellectuals is to transform the unthinkable into plausible it would be a great achievement if academia were able to convince society about how highly competitive sports keep us imprisoned to our tribal past thus preventing the advancement of Humanity towards the type 1 civilization that we need and hope to become.
