For decades, sports physicians at the University of Freiburg have been doping top athletes from various sports. Organized sport, politics, and the science involved have covered this system and, to some extent, also impeded enlightenment. In most cases, the athletes involved probably knew what they were doing. How does that go together with the claim of maturity of athletes? For the sports educator and philosopher Timo Stiller from the Schwäbisch Gmünd University of Education, this is a contradiction in terms.
Stiller explained on Deutschlandfunk that doping is a means of making victory predictable and available. However, the problem is: “As soon as this availability occurs, it gets boring. And sport is basically the last biotope where unavailability is part of the system. And as soon as I let this unavailability become plannable, the system collapses. ”
Because the more plannable the sport becomes, the more it gets rid of itself, said Stiller. “Because even small children learn: If I know I’m going to lose, I won’t play.” It needs the unavailability, the openness of sporting competition for the sporting competition to find resonance.
“Why do we need top-class sport?”
Doping circumvents this principle, even if the same conditions are apparently created again. But behind it is the desire to be able to plan successes. “That’s exactly why we as a society must finally ask this crucial question: Why do we need top-class sport and why do we want top-class sport?”
But what happens if there are no successes? And the audience’s excitement for their own compatriots no longer has any protagonists? Ultimately, it is always about identification for spectators, says sports educator Stiller. “And that’s why I don’t want to abolish top-class sport, I basically want to abolish unpersonalized top-class sport. And it becomes unpersonalized when only the result counts. And it becomes personalized when the focus is on the human being. And then it gets very interesting , because then even the defeat counts. If it was achieved with the greatest effort or had to be tolerated, then we regard this responsible loser much more highly than the underage winner.”
This can be seen, for example, in professional football. “In the most professional and most perverted system, this juxtaposition reveals that only in football, for example, do we have the swear word of the ‘success fan’, who in turn is not someone we want. We want to have someone who has the passion, even in football of defeat to a club when the club, when the players have struggled.”
Development of personalities as a goal of promotion
The goal of public funding for top-class sport should therefore no longer be the number of medals, but the development of personalities who are role models. “Let’s be honest: The one we root for the most is the one who puts in the most effort and also makes us understand that. We can’t get the passion explained, but we understand what might be happening there. Well “It’s the difference between what we understand about passion and what we’re told about it. And that’s where we can’t get any further. We finally need to understand what makes these athletes passionate.”
If a sports funding system were based on this understanding and not on results, a system like the one in Freiburg sports medicine would implode, says Stiller. “It already implodes when individual athletes take their maturity seriously. For example, when Max Hartung said in the current sports studio that he wasn’t going to the Olympic Games in the Corona pandemic, everyone was still wobbling around. He recognized his maturity. And that, What I’m asking of athletes is an attitude. And that’s an attitude towards fair play. And if they give that up, then, logically, the system is broken.”