The drive to commercialize sport and commodify players may seem overwhelming, but there is an equal and opposite force within sport that attracts significantly less media attention but continues to grow just as inexorably. How to describe? We can call this the soul and spirit of sports. Real value, which cannot be measured by transfer fees but has a much greater and much longer lasting value. Or just the magic of sports. It may never be the most important plot of Match of the Day, but sport can never divorce itself from the basic human experiences at its core.
That’s why we all love to watch, play and engage in sport, whether it’s the two Lukes battling it out in the riveting world darts world championship final, Roger Federer’s spectacular shots at Wimbledon or those moments of joy the crowd feels while watching. Their favorite team achieves the impossible in the last seconds of overtime. We don’t always question what goes on beyond trophies and titles, but BBC sports presenter Simon Mundie has written a book to help us understand this better.
Mundie has interviewed hundreds of athletes on his podcast, Life Lessons. She discovered that medals were not the most important thing to the people she interviewed. It was something less tangible but much more powerful. In his book, Champion Mindset: How to Find Success Without Losing Yourself, Mundie collected some of the best stories and drew ideas from them.
Mundie explores themes of “acceptance,” “unconscious beliefs,” and “the joy of losing oneself.” It’s no surprise that we formed a strong bond on the podcast about my book, The Long Win. In my own experience as an Olympian for over a decade, I have found that the journey that begins with the pursuit of medals, which everyone around me says are the most important thing, soon leads to a search for greater meaning.
It’s a story many athletes repeat. Victoria Pendleton felt “empty” and “numb” when she won gold at the Beijing Olympics. Andrew Strauss “Is that it?” asked. after his side became the No. 1 Test team in the world for the first time. Tyson Fury spoke of “emptiness” the morning after beating world champion Wladimir Klitschko. Adam Peaty described the destructive spiral of “constant chasing”: “I always thought success and happiness was defined by a gold medal or a world record. I’m trying not to live with that anymore.” England World Cup-winning scrum-half Jonny Wilkinson has spoken of his depression and the next title or championship He hoped it would bring joy, but in his own words, “it’s never enough.” Mundie reflects on what these athletes, who have reached the highest status in the sport, are missing.
Wilkinson features in Mundie’s book and has gone to great lengths to rethink the sport. His podcast “I Am” marks a journey of self-discovery through quantum physics, Buddhism and philosophy. Wilkinson, who broke the bar with the goal he scored in extra time to win the tournament for England in 2003, destroys everything we think we know about the sport in a way that is as ruthless as he fights with his opponents on the field.
Wilkinson attacks common stereotypes that describe him as someone extraordinarily dedicated; This is how he shows examples of the hours he spent training for goal kicks long after his teammates had gone home. He reveals how this obsessive behavior actually causes great wear and tear on his body, and that this stems from fear, insecurity and “lack of self-confidence”.
Wilkinson and Mundie interviewed philosopher and “spiritual teacher” Rupert Spira and were deeply impressed by him. Spira’s views are as limited as you can get from what’s being discussed on the Match of the Day couch. Yet Spira offers the answers to making sense of the sport, the scoreboard and endless trophies and championships in a way Wilkinson never could. Spira expands Mundie’s understanding of “flow” experiences in sport by supporting him in his quest to find the “real gold of sport”.
Mundie’s final and most compelling chapter explores moments of sporting joy and transcendence, inhuman possibilities, a greater form of intelligence, and the magic of the universe. Mundie includes Wilkinson’s winning goal in 2003, Damon Hill’s incredible drive at Suzuka in 1994, Frankie Dettori’s seventh and final drive at Ascot in 1996 and Goldie Sayers’s javelin throw at the Beijing Olympics. He refers to his enthusiastic experience. In each of these moments, the athletes use similar language: “I felt like I was there, but I wasn’t there,” Dettori says. “It was like I wasn’t driving the car, something else was,” Hill says. “It wasn’t me who kicked him; it was knowing that,” says Wilkinson.
Groundbreaking psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, who coined the term “flow” for these moments of beauty, described it as the “transformation of time.” This is the ultimate human time traveler that we can all access in these moments. It’s easy to see how much we all miss this in our lives.
Mundie’s writing resonates, expressing things I feel instinctively but don’t always know how to explain. When asked to share the best moment of my rowing career, others expect the answer to be a medal-winning race. But my mind always jumps to a few truly delightful moments at a training camp on a beautiful Italian lake surrounded by mountains, when everything suddenly clicked and our rowing boat took off, flying seemingly effortlessly even though we were rowing straight ahead.
Spira describes the experiences of fans and spectators who were inspired by witnessing a greater force in the game. He reinterprets the moment when the fans experienced deep joy when a goal was scored. He explains that our minds tell us it is because a goal is scored, and so we associate joy with scoring a goal, which is further reinforced by commentators and those around us.
But Spira reads that moment differently. Until that moment, we focused on waiting for the moment we wanted to happen, anticipating a goal. When the goal is actually achieved, it is the release of expectation and relaxation that creates joy. We no longer put joy on hold until something happens in the future. We can connect freely to the present moment. Because we are so intensely present and connected, we lose the sense of being separate individuals and feel like we are part of something larger than ourselves. This is powerful stuff, a far cry from the typical sofa specialists we have.
Relating to: Sports isn’t just about winning; There are also lessons to teach us about life
The mindfulness-based programs that The True Athlete Project (a brilliant sports charity I support) deliver to elite athletes, coaches, grassroots sports clubs and sports leaders are sometimes mocked. Leaders assume that athletes will not be interested in discovering their inner worth or identity beyond sport, or that coaches will not be interested in connecting with their work beyond winning games. But CEO Sam Parfitt is repeatedly struck by the instinctive connection to this approach and the sense of common sense that comes with finding what they have missed for so long. Performance expert Owen Eastwood described to me the work of developing high-performance teams as a “spiritual challenge” and said that despite warnings that players would resist his approach, he had yet to find an athlete who did not yearn to be connected to something greater. than themselves.
Sport is a natural context for human innovation. Many athletes and coaches realize that our physical limits are limited, but there is still much to be gained from exploring the mind more deeply. I hope that in 2024 our commentators, journalists and pundits will also take some time to challenge the assumptions they have made about what is most valuable in the sport that lies ahead. Mundie’s book offers a good starting point for exploring this further. I’d love to see Spira in Lineker’s Match of the Day chair.
Champion Mindset: How to Find Success Without Losing Yourself Published by Bloomsbury Tonic £18.99. Buy guardianbookshop.com for £16.71