Saturday Sports, #2

All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed of mental blessings. To begin with, they are so deficient in reasoning powers that they do not even know whether they have a brain. Always gorging themselves on flesh and blood, they keep their brains soaked in so much filth that they are unable to think accurately and are as mindless as dumb animals.

Perhaps it will be claimed that athletes achieve some of the physical blessings. Will they claim the most important blessing of all: health? You will find no one in a more treacherous physical condition... Their sleep is also immoderate. When normal people have ended their work and are hungry, athletes are just getting up from their naps. In fact, their lives are like those of pigs, except that pigs do not overexert or force feed themselves...

I think that it has become abundantly clear that the practice of athletics has no utility in the real business of life. You would further learn that there is nothing worth mention in such practice if I tell you the myth some talented man put into words. It goes like this: if Zeus decided that all the animals should live in harmony and partnership, and the herald invited to Olympia not only men but also animals to compete in the stadium, I think that no man would be crowned. In the dolichos the horse will be the best, the stadion will belong to the hare, and the gazelle will be first in the diaulos. Wretched men, nimble experts, none of you would be counted in the footraces. Nor would any of you descendants of Herakles be stronger than the elephant or the lion. I think that the bull would be crowned in the pyx and the donkey would, if he decided to enter, win the kicking crown...

This myth shows quite nicely that athletic strength does not reside in human training. And yet, if athletes cannot be better than animals in strength, what other blessing do they share in?

Perhaps someone will say that they have a blessing in the pleasure of their bodies. But how can they derive any pleasure from their bodies if during their athletic years they are in constant pain and suffering, not only because of their exercises but also because of their forced feedings? And when they reach the age of retirement, their bodies are essentially if not completely crippled.

Are athletes perhaps to be worshipped like kings because they have large incomes? Yet they are all in debt, not only during the time they are competing but also after retirement.

--Galen, Exhortation for Medicine 9-14; A 215.

Comments

[Abbas Raza]

This is great!

[The Necromancer]

Amazing example of a character-based understanding of medicine and health that hardly exists anymore; Habitus, let's say...