‘Come on, it's not a matter of life and death’, said some Job-like comforter, following a defeat in a football match. ‘No’, replied Bill Shankly, the granite-like Scot who was manager of Liverpool FC during their days of pre-eminence, whose team had just lost, ‘it is more important than that’.

Another scene from the same era. July 13^th 1967, at around 3.00 p.m. in the afternoon, on the upper slopes of Mont Ventoux, and Shankly's black humour, if such it was, might not have seemed so clever. Tom Simpson, the world champion cyclist and BBC Sports Personality of the Year of 1965, is lying dead on the road-side. Fuelled by drugs and alcohol, in a desperate effort to force the pace in the Tour de France's most punishing stage, Simpson had collapsed, overcome by dehydration (riders were rationed in those days to four small bottles of water), the pitiless sun and the several hours of riding already accomplished. ‘Put me back on the bike’ are supposed to have been his last words, though it seems that what he actually said was ‘Go on, go on’.

With a mixture of grittiness and sentimentality (neither ever far away where sport is concerned), thinking of Simpson lying motionless in the dust, one is inevitably reminded of Lorca's lament for another dead hero, the bull-fighter Ignacio Sanchez Mejias, whose body is still in the ring:

Tommy Simpson and Ingacio Sanchez Mejias are by no means the only sportspeople who died in the pursuit of their goals. To name a few others, taken at random, Ayrton Senna, Daniel Wheldon, Marco Simoncelli (motor sport, and many others before them, of course), Raman Lamba (cricket, of all things, killed by a blow to the head when fielding helmet-less at short leg), Leavander Johnson (boxing), Fran Crippen (swimming), Marc-Vivien Foe and Phil O'Donnell (soccer), Daniel James (rugby), to say nothing of numerous riders, eventers and jockeys (riding being said to be the most dangerous sport of all), and of course of climbers, including some of the very best (George Mallory, Toni Kurz, Allison Hargreaves, Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker).

So sport, and not just professional sport, and the extremes of effort and danger involved, leads people to their death. I can actually think of two people known to me who died on the squash court, and of one who died after rowing training in a local gym, the last in his early twenties. Whether or not such deaths are in some objective sense ‘acceptable’, no one I know has allowed them or knowledge of them to impede their own sporting endeavours.

But it is not just those who play, for fun or (ironically) for a living who allow sport to play a very large role in their lives. Many who follow sport and who talk and write about it treat it as very important indeed. They invest considerable time and money in their pursuit, to say nothing of the emotional investment involved in supporting a team or country or even an individual, often to the extent of engaging in what might seem to the dispassionate to be a collective local or national hysteria. Think of Henmania in tennis, or the way the 2005 Ashes seemed to grip the nation (or at least a large part of it), in this latter case to such an extent that many of those most emotionally involved could not actually bring themselves to watch the final afternoon on television (where, had they actually kept their nerve, they would have seen the South African Kevin Petersen destroying the Australian bowling on this nation's behalf). Many would say that all of this was and is disproportionate. Sport just cannot be that important and grown men (and women) should grow up.

Of course, in some periods of history there have been ‘games’ that have been seriously matters of life and death, contests such as the Roman gladiatorial contests (or some of them anyway) and the gruesome Aztec spectacles in which losers were viciously butchered and sacrificed to the gods enamoured of D.H. Lawrence. But one way in which the type of sport many of us are interested in is different from these sorts of things is that contestants are not fighting for their lives and, even in disciplines like boxing and wrestling, whose very aim is to inflict physical suffering on one's opponent, losers normally live to fight another day. So our question is whether sport in the sense we are familiar with is something that grown up members of society should spend considerable amounts of time, effort and money in playing and watching.

Is sport important at all? What would be its rightful place in the lives of reasonable people? These are the questions I would like now to consider. To do this, I suggest that we start with a text as old and as foundational as any in our literature, Homer's Iliad, and itself in all probability drawing on even older oral tradition, perhaps as early as the eighth or ninth centuries BC. For nearly the whole of Book XXIII is devoted to a description of the games the Achaeans hold to mark the funeral of Patroclus.

Actually, even before the account of the games we are given a clue highly germane to our general theme. Patroclus' shade appears to Achilles, who is organising the games, to remind him that he, Patroclus had first appeared in Achilles' house as a young boy, ‘banished for bloody murder’, for killing the son of Amphidamas in a quarrel over a dice game. There is, it appears, nothing new about the red mist descending over something so trivial as a game, nor is Patroclus any less upright and decent a character than the Rooneys, Beckhams and Zidanes who have similarly, though less lethally disgraced themselves on the world stage.

As to the games themselves, the Achaeans, taking a break from their more deadly pursuits, are clearly enthralled and wholly engaged by the sport, as over several hundred lines of poetry Homer expects his readers and listeners to be; nor is there any shortage of prizes for the competitors, on-course betting on the part of spectators and tedious ‘expert’ commentary and advice from ex-players resting on their laurels and pontificating about how it was in the days of their youth. Nothing new in any of this, then; and if some might raise an eyebrow at the trophies in at least two of the events including ‘women sashed and lovely’, to do so would betray a degree of naivety regarding the post-match activities of some of our top athletes, the main difference between then and now being that what happens on these occasions these days is usually, though, as court cases occasionally reveal not invariably, consensual on all sides.

The first event in the games is the chariot race, which actually reads like an account of a Formula One Grand Prix of today. Of the five competitors, Eumeleus crashes out, attempting too tight a turn, while between two of the others there is what would euphemistically be described to-day as a ‘coming together’ when the young blood Antilochus pushes the more senior Menelaus off the course as they both make for a narrow gap. There is a furious argument at the end, which is settled only when Antilochus wisely attributes his misdemeanour not, as might be expected in Homer, to the intervention of a god, but to the way in which ‘the whims of youth break all the rules’. Quite; some of today's champions clearly anticipated by nearly three thousand years, but in the Homeric case with an apology added. Next, there is the boxing, in which pre-bout, millennia before the self-preening of Mohammed Ali, Epeus, the eventual winner, proclaims himself ‘the greatest’. The wrestling, between big Ajax and Odysseus, long since sworn enemies, is clearly what would today be called a needle match, and is saved from a probably lethal outcome only by the intervention of Achilles, in effect stopping the fight: ‘Don't kill yourselves in sport’. This injunction is still highly relevant three thousand or so years later. In many sports today, rugby, for example, without an unspoken code setting limits to what might be done, players would be liable to kill each other, which explains why people take such a dim view when these limits are transgressed.

To return to Patroclus' games, In the running (won by Odysseus, Athena's favourite) much merriment and ‘banter’ (in the Fagles translation) is caused when the lesser Ajax, who was leading at the time is tripped up by Athena, as we are told, slipping in a pile of dung left over from the chariot race. And so it goes on, with fighting with lances, shot-putting, archery and spear-throwing (today's javelin, no doubt).

It could be said that all the disciplines represented in Book XXIII relate pretty closely to battle skills. Further, the sports and games of the ancient world have been describedFootnote ¹ as ‘an aristocratic legacy’. But I don't think either of these things mean that what Homer is describing is essentially different from sport in our time. Even if the funeral games are based on battle skills, in the games there are formal rules and set-ups which are not those of battle, and one could easily envisage these developing along their own artificial lines, channelling them into trajectories of their own, ever further removed from the conditions of an actual battle, as they become autonomous activities in their own right. Further, even if the ancient games began with aristocratic pursuits, in the classical world they were never confined to aristocratic entrants (as Lane Fox himself points out); indeed, Baron de Coubertin notwithstanding, the big games of the classical world gradually became the preserve of semi-professional competitors who stood to make fortunes out of successes, just as now, and they clearly attracted audiences from all sections of society.

It is, of course, true that the actual games in the Greek world were all connected to religious festivals, Olympia, for example, being one of the greatest and most important sanctuaries of the Greek world. Much could be said about this aspect of Greek games (as is taken up by Heather Reid in this volume), but I will confine myself here to two small points. For the ancient Greeks, the world was full of gods, in the sense that everything was permeated by an aura of the divine, with no clear distinction between the sacred and the secular, but this did not necessarily mean that there was any specifically religious reference in day to day activities while those activities were being conducted (perhaps symbolised by the fact that the stadia and race tracks of Olympia were actually outside the Altis, the Olympian sanctuary. And (the second point), in Homer's account at least, once the games get going there is no explicit reference at all to the fact that they are part of a memorial to a dead hero, nor do any of the competitors and spectators seem to have any such thought uppermost in their minds as the games go on, or indeed any thought but to play the game.

And that in itself, tells us something about sport. In the main, sporting activities are such that once one is involved in them, even at low levels, what one is doing completely occupies you physically and mentally. At the extreme this intense concentration on something other than oneself, and a feeling that one is taken over by it, is what athletes sometimes refer to by being ‘in the zone’. It is as if one is taken over by something outside oneself (and so could easily be interpreted in divine or shamanistic terms if one felt so inclined), sometimes to such an extent that one feels the shot is being played for one, that one is not aware of preparing for it, or how one did it, to take the feeling as it manifests itself in a game like tennis or cricket, but analogous things are perceived in activities as disparate as rock-climbing, distance running and football. It might not be too much to think in this context of what Buddhists speak of as mindfulness or one single pointedness, a degree of attention and concentration so intense that consciousness itself is transcended in a complete bodily and psychic focus on the act itself, to the exclusion of all else, including thinking at an explicit level about what one is doing.

I think that most people who have played any sort of physical game will have got an inkling of this sort of thing on the frustratingly rare occasions when a tennis or golf shot has gone just right without one thinking about it, but even if what I am suggesting here involves a degree of pardonable exaggeration, the following is certainly true. Most sports involve players physically and mentally to such a degree that for the time of playing they necessarily cut themselves off from everything else and from thoughts of everything else. Indeed this self-insulation from the rest of experience can be one of the most refreshing aspects of playing a game. While the game lasts there is no room for doing anything else, worrying about anything else, thinking about anything else. And while one is playing, one has more than enough to think about and to do, to plan, to analyse, to psych out one's opponent(s), etc.

Kendall WaltonFootnote ² talks in this context of sport as being a case of ‘make belief’, that in playing a game of tennis with a friend, for example, during the game I act as if these things really matter, as if I really want to destroy him, as if for the duration of the game everything depends on the outcome. Of course, it doesn't, and as soon as the game is finished, we both come out of the make-belief bubble and have a relaxing drink and a friendly chat. As he puts it ‘to participate either as a competitor or as a spectator (of sport) is frequently, if not invariably, to engage in pretense’, while fans let themselves be carried away as though genuine and substantial values are at stake.

While there is something right about what Walton says, at least to the extent that for most people playing a game is a self-contained episode, more or less insulated from the rest of their life, I think that to talk of what goes on in a match as make-belief is too weak. Maybe when watching a play or a film or reading a novel, our emotions are in a certain sense ‘make-belief’ (as Walton famously avers), but when I feel exhilaration at winning a point or anger at messing up (or at my partner messing up), these emotions are real enough, even if transient (as Walton does actually allow). Further in sport, in contrast to fictions of one sort and another, there is always the element not just of unpredictability but rather more of my actions affecting the outcome. What I do, how I play, my focus and motivation – all are vital both to the game and the result. I am wholly involved, whether I like it or not, and even whether I am trying or not. There is nothing make-believe about any of this, all of which points to significant differences between sport and fiction or drama. Nor, if what I am saying is right, are sports fans necessarily wrong to feel that in watching sport genuine and substantial values are in some sense at stake.

It might be said that my perspective on sport is a typically Western one, more specifically a Graeco-Roman one, in that cultures not influenced by Greece and Rome, and maybe latterly by Anglo-Saxon sporting traditions, have not made such a big thing of organised sport. I do not know how true this is, except to say that, for better or worse, sport of the sort described by Homer and of the sort which may have developed on the playing fields of English public schools in the nineteenth century is now truly global, as we see from the well-nigh universal popularity of phenomena such as the Olympic Games and the football World Cup. And in these activities and in the more local competitions and individual games throughout the world, it is possible to see the instantiation of all sorts of genuine values, the sharing of sincere emotions and the exemplification of real and not pretend virtues and vices.

In different ways and in different proportions in pretty well all sports you will find examples of application, hard work, effort, perseverance and skill. Indeed without a modicum of all of these you will make no progress at all, and the game is hardly worth playing. Underpinning what we might think of as these executive requirements, there is also the need to practice and to achieve a level of physical fitness at least appropriate to the standard at which one is playing. It is possible that a strict neo-Aristotelian might quibble about whether or not these executive requirements, as I am calling them, are really virtues, given that they may not be aimed at anything intrinsically worthwhile, though such an objection would not be open to Aristotle himself: in the ancient Greek world gymnastic was a key part of human flourishing, and essential to education, recognising indeed our essentially embodied nature and the excellence deriving from a vigorous physicality. There would for the ancient Greeks probably be something slightly shameful about a man, even in jest, proclaiming that his recreations consisted solely in sedentary pursuits; while Homer compounds Thersites' moral shamelessness with a description of him as bandy-legged, his shoulders humped together, curving over a caved-in chest, with a head bobbing above them, his skull warped to a point – at least some of which could, one imagines, have been ameliorated by healthy exercise and an upright posture.

But it is not just hard work, exercise and effort which are necessary to sporting endeavour. In most sports there are plenty of opportunities for the exercise of courage, either moral or physical, and often both. There may well be the conquest of fear, certainly in contact sports, but also in non-contact sports, in facing an intimidating opponent and possible humiliation. There is also learning how to deal with loss and actual humiliation, which happens even to the best and those most unaccustomed to it. In this context Rafael Nadal was impressive on losing the final set of a final (in which he had been leading until mid-way through the second set) to Andy Murray 6-0: ‘You don't like to lose 6-0, but it happens.’ (Though, one might have thought, not often to Nadal.) ‘Andy played fantastic. Accept. That's it.’ One could imagine the gritted teeth and mental turmoil behind that ‘accept’, but he wasn't going to show it, or to begrudge his opponent his day in the sun, and that showed class and grace. I hope that Murray was as gracious in victory, for that is also a virtue sport gives opportunities for.

Of course, to sport's virtues there are also the corresponding vices, to courage and resilience a lack of moral and physical fibre, cowardice even (the player who shirks a tackle), to graciousness in victory and defeat, arrogance on the one hand and moaning and complaining on the other. There are also players who deliberately set out to intimidate (a fine line here between intimidation and what might be called stamping one's authority). There are players, who in the heat of the moment, are unable to control their aggression (again a fine line between unacceptable aggressiveness and the moral and physical force necessary not to be pushed around by one's opponent).

Then there are players who cheat, openly or surreptitiously, and who indulge in what are known as professional fouls. There are those who try to rile their opponents by insulting them, and those who try to influence referees and umpires by constantly complaining, glaring at them, questioning their decisions, and in the case of football particularly feigning injury and pretending to be fouled with the express purpose of being awarded a free kick or penalty. And on the other hand there are players who abide by the rules and the spirit of the game, who show referees and opponents respect, and who refrain what has come to be called ‘banter’ (i.e. a constant stream of unfunny and often malicious remarks about opponents with the specific purpose of unsettling them).

Given that the vices just listed may well help to sway a result, and are certainly believed to do so, it will take some strength of mind to stay honest, especially as there are coaches – at all levels – who expect their players to manipulate the game in underhand ways. The triumph of injustice is perhaps the hardest thing to deal with in sport, with the temptation to get away with what one can – just so as to even things up – the greater. In the world as it is today, particularly the world of professional sport, is there any point in cultivating personal integrity? Mike Atherton's great innings against South Africa at Trent Bridge in 1998 (98 not out, to win an intensely fought match) was made the more remarkable by the remorseless barrage of hostile bowling he had to face from Allan Donald – when Atherton had actually been caught off Donald early on in his innings. Later on, the unmoved and immovable Atherton gave the glove off which he had been caught, with the red mark of the ball still on it, duly ringed and autographed to Donald to sell at his benefit auction. And whatever the immorality of not walking no one could gainsay Atherton's bravery or his sheer will-power. And yet, for all the dubious behaviour of so many of us when we think we can get away with it, people do on occasion play absolutely straight, and are admired for it, golfers who own up to having inadvertently moved their ball, cricketers who, unlike Atherton, walk before being given out, Arsène Wenger offering Sheffield United a re-match in 1999 after Arsenal had won a cup tie through in effect stealing a goal. But it is not just injustice which arises from human agency that sport teaches us to deal with. Sometimes results are just unjust: chance plays a large role in sport, something else which can be dealt with either with dignity and stoicism, or the opposite.

And finally in this quick and no doubt incomplete review of virtues and vices intrinsic to sport, there are the virtues connected to playing in a team, such as solidarity, co-operation, team spirit and so on. These virtues become particularly impressive when they enable teams which start as underdogs to overcome individually more skilled opponents. They also militate against show-boating arrogance, so prevalent in boxing, for example, which can be distasteful in all sorts of ways.

I would not claim that people who exemplify specific virtues and vices in sport necessarily behave the same way in other areas of their lives. Someone who is mild, articulate and reasonable away from the rugby pitch or the tennis court can exhibit quasi-psychopathic tendencies in the heat of a game. Equally players noted for their stoicism and uprightness on the pitch can be quite weak characters off it. What I would, though, claim is that sporting virtues are virtues and sporting vices vices. As in any other walk of life, sporting virtues require self-control and good judgement, and their opposites lack of these desirable qualities. They are not pretend virtues or make-believe vices, and I would conjecture that there is more overlap here between good character on the field and off it than there is complete disjunction.

And I would say something similar about sporting pressure. However unimportant sport may be, people who feel tense and pressured in sport do feel real pressure, even if it may be short-lived. Keith Miller, the famous Australian cricketer, who had also been an RAAF fighter pilot in the war is supposed to have said when he was asked about the pressure of playing a test match; ‘Pressure? Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, not playing cricket.’ One can see what Miller, a larger than life swashbuckling character, meant, but what he says is unfair to the likes of Marcus Tresthcothick, a top cricketer who certainly suffered intensely from sporting pressure, to the extent that he had to retire from test matches and undergo serious medical treatment. Trescothick seems thankfully to have recovered, unlike Robert Enke, the German international goalkeeper, who committed suicide in 2009, because of depression and anxiety apparently arising from the pressures of top flight football. Sporting pressure, like sporting virtues and vices, is certainly real enough, and as intense as pressure in other walks of life. The question, though, is whether it is disproportionate, whether it is sensible for people to get so het up about things which (it would be said) don't really matter.

In one sense, they certainly do matter. Mike Atherton could have been seriously injured by Allan Donald, and the same goes for almost anyone preparing for a serious game of rugby, who may well have to cope with potentially lethal assaults, which would certainly attract the interest of the police were they to happen in the street. A golfer stands to win or lose very large sums of money by his performance, as do tennis players, footballers, elite athletes and many others. Even amateur players at much lower levels invest considerable pride in their performances; self-esteem at least is often at stake, even if one pretends to laugh (or drink) it off afterwards. So do spectators, who often follow teams or individuals with anorak like concentration and intense, but ultimately fruitless passion, made all the more poignant because it is a passion which is at bottom passive. And mention of spectators may remind us that sports crowds can be vicious and venomous, an occasion for a licensed display of some of the worst aspects of our nature, a point not lost on George Orwell, who (in ‘The Sporting Spirit’) wrote of sport being ‘an unfailing cause of ill will… leading to orgies of hatred’, in which ‘savage competitive passions are aroused’, with fighting on the field and spectators booing referees and trying to intimidate players. Everything Orwell says is true, and no one should underestimate or overlook the sheer atavistic hatred, mob behaviour and stupidity which can be aroused by sporting contests. But Orwell was a great polemicist, and he tells only half the story, though on the negative side we could add the deformations which have occurred since Orwell's time due to the intertwining of sport and great wealth and also due to the corrupt bureaucracies big-money sports seem unable to avoid spawning. But, as I say, the negative side is only half the story. Sport can also be the occasion for genuine comradeship and magnanimity, between players and spectators alike, as well as friendships which may transcend team affiliations and go far beyond the game itself, and it may (and does on occasion) also help to heal wounds resulting from age-old oppression, prejudice and historical hatreds.

So we come to the question which has been underlying much of the discussion so far. Is anything more than a mild and passing involvement in sport disproportionate, infantile even, a prolongation of what should have tapered off with the transition from childhood? Sport is certainly what Pascal would have called a diversion. It is not just disconnected from other aspects of life, and something done to a greater or less extent for its own sake, but it is a distraction from what really matters. From Pascal's perspective this is certainly true. However, if Pascal's perspective is implicitly critical of sport, it does not do many other human activities any favours either, including those activities which many would contrast with sport to sport's disadvantage. For Pascal's perspective is that of the four last things, death, judgement, heaven and hell. And it is a besetting human weakness to be unable sit still, as he says, even for a quarter of an hour, in case we should be faced with thought of these ultimate realities. If sport is, in that sense divertissement, a diversion, so is most of what most people do, in a desperate effort to keep their minds occupied with trivia.

The hustle and bustle and busyness with which rulers and magistrates surround themselves, no doubt complaining all the while about being over-worked and under-resourced, is actually what they are seeking, the ostensible ends of their activity a mere rationalisation. They want to do anything but think about themselves, or attend to their parlous condition. Stuck between the infinitely big and the infinitely small, we can cope with neither. We neither understand ourselves, nor can we get a firm footing over the abyss which confronts us, and into which we dare not look, and we hide all this from ourselves by continuous activity. It is perhaps worth recalling at this point that Hume, who shared much of Pascal's philosophical scepticism, in a strange way agreed with Pascal at this point. For Hume the only way to avoid the abyss into which his philosophical reflections inexorably led him was to engage in diversion, dining, making merry with his friends and playing backgammon.

‘Man's condition: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.’ (Pensées. 24/22) From Pascal's point of view it is not just sport which comes off badly. Most of human activity serves the function of diverting us; if we are in business we would not want just to be given the money we work so long and hard to earn; the huntsman likes the six hours of the chase, and would not be at all satisfied with simply being handed the hare or the boar; the magistrate or official is happy only when he has a great number of people pressing on him from all sides from morning to night, so as not to leave a single hour when he could think about his own condition. (See Pensées 136/126) Rest is unbearable because of the boredom and worse it engenders; on the other hand, the slightest thing like a billiard cue and a ball can divert us for hours on end.

According to the Stoics, whom Pascal follows in this respect, all those activities which do not contribute in the highest degree to wisdom are equally foolish and vicious, which if hardly a ringing endorsement of sport, may give us some sort of perspective. Tourism, fashion, show-business, gardening, food and drink as hobbies are all, like sport, activities engaged in for their own sakes, but which may well fall far below what Pascal or the Stoics would count as wisdom. No doubt there are also many other activities which may ostensibly serve other ends, but which as Pascal suggests are engaged in for large part for the diversionary potential of the activity itself. Think of the self-important peer waddling in and out of the House of Lords, of the puffed-up local busybody (often a paid councillor) moralising about this or organising protests about that, of the bureaucrat straining every nerve to ensure that he has yet more important tasks to fulfil (public choice theory!), or of the desolation of the retired academic deprived of his adrenaline fix of committees and senates. Sport at least does not on the whole pretend to be more important than it is (even if politicians like to bask in its reflected glory, often to the discomfort of the players so exploited), nor on the playing side at least is it shot through with moralism in the way so much journalism and politics is. Indeed the very fact that in most sports there is a result which everyone has to accept, sooner or later, actually endows sport with more objectivity and backbone than many human pursuits.

The claim against sport is that it too often plays a disproportionate part in people's lives. To this a tu quoque argument seems to me to be an appropriate response. Sport is not a matter of transcendent wisdom, nor is it a matter of life and death, even if sometimes people do die because of sport. But then, outside of famines, wars and natural disasters little of what we do is a matter of life and death, and sport is probably no more dangerous statistically than, say, driving or smoking. Nor are most of us capable of spending much time in the icy regions of the spirit inhabited by Pascal or at the intense levels of aesthetic contemplation demanded by Bach or Milton or with the intellectual rigour required by a serious engagement with Plato or Wittgenstein.

If the complaint is that sport is essentially escapism, if what is being escaped from is the drudgery and drabness in which many are compelled to work and live, the colour and excitement and drama of sport may be no bad thing, and in its demands on the attentiveness of the whole person it may actually be a good way of rising above the coils of self-centredness. Further an attractive and often under-valued aspect of much sport is that it is essentially a voluntary activity, an example of the operation of the Burkean ‘little platoon’ in which people freely and spontaneously form themselves into clubs and societies for playing and watching, and in doing so participate in all the codes and structures such bodies evolve. In this way they contribute mightily to the bonds and orders which a healthy society depends on, but in a bottom-up way, as week after week perhaps millions of people, without any form of compulsion join in local sporting activities, either as players or spectators. This aspect of sport is perhaps hidden by the pre-eminence of such ghastly trans-national bureaucracies as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA and their national counterparts, often virtually arms of the state and even funded by the state. But, for all the noise they make, these are not the norm, at least not in the non-socialist world. Not the least of sport's virtues is that in many countries its very existence is a symptom of a healthy and invigorating freedom, with much to admire socially and educationally in the bodies and organisations such freedoms engender.