Dialogue: PC attitude led to Olympics fiasco

There are two fundamental reasons for our athletes' poor performance at the Olympic Games, and it wouldn't have mattered had they been held in Sydney or Stockholm.

The first is that this nation as a whole lacks the moral fibre it once had, and this creeping infection has spread into all its institutions, including the Government, the churches and sport.

The second is that in recent times sport has become, for many of those elite competitors of whom we expect so much, a job rather than a pastime. Where once our top athletes competed for their country, nowadays most of them do it for an employer.

Remember that most of our athletes today are products of what has become known as Generation X. And surely we have read in these columns and elsewhere enough about the thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviour of Generation Xers to know where they're coming from, if not where they're going.

These are the children of the New Age, of the age of political correctness, of the philosophy which preaches "tolerance" ad nauseam, which means that everyone has to put up with anything and everything, whether they like it or not.

It seems so far to have escaped these apostles of "tolerance" that they will only tolerate that with which they agree. And those who don't agree are accused of being bigoted, judgmental or old-fashioned, or all three - in other words, intolerant.

It is within that doctrine of "tolerance" that our moral decline has taken place. We have been led to believe that "if it feels good, do it" is a landmark of human progress and that there is such a thing as a "victimless crime" so it has to be decriminalised.

As my favourite Generation Xer insisted in her column this week, "The truth is in the language." If that is so, then where is the truth in the term "victimless crime," for that is a contradiction in terms, if there ever was one.

But I digress. The national concern over the mediocre display of our premier sportsmen and women is on the same level as our concern over the fact that our children seem to be growing up without "values," which is today's politically correct metaphor for what used to be known as traditional morality.

In the days of our sporting greatness our sporting greats imbibed this traditional morality from birth, either directly from their parents or by osmosis from society.

They didn't have to be taught things like love of country, national pride, unselfishness, courage, perseverance, sacrifice, determination - these things were as natural to them as breathing because they had grown up in a society that valued them. Indeed, it was those character traits which made our revered sporting greats the heroic men and women they were.

They had spirit. And they had spirit because every one of the character traits that made them winners is spiritual rather than physical and mental. Spirit is what is lacking today, and all the money and coaching and psychology and high-tech equipment in the world will count for nothing without it.

We need as a nation to take a long, hard look at where we've been and where we are now and to understand that somewhere along the line of what we have invariably called "progress" we have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

One of the clearest evidences that sport has become a job rather than a pastime is the constant and often bitter criticism levelled at our athletes when they fail to live up to our expectations. This is a relatively modern phenomenon, for, as I recall, it didn't happen in the days when our athletes were genuinely amateur.

Among the loudest critics have been those who resent the spending of "taxpayers' money" on sportsmen and women who don't deliver, as if being a taxpayer gives one some sort of proprietary interest in the athletes.

This is nonsense. And, in any case, it seems that the "taxpayers' money" these people complain about is only the public spending which is of no personal benefit to themselves.

Commercial sponsorship, however, is much more insidious, for how are we to know that the sponsors' and the nation's aims are in tune? Do we know what sort of pressures, financial and psychological, sponsorship puts on athletes?

Does competing for money carry the same mental and emotional incentives as competing for oneself, one's team, one's nation? Does it make it all too easy?

In trying to cure our sporting malaise, let us for once look for the causes before trying to treat the symptoms.