Over the Christmas break, I was struck down with the classic case of small-town tedium which befalls any Cambridge student living outside the big smoke. I was also ‘a bit injured’, and these two circumstances, compounded by my newfound enthusiasm for the autobiographies of umpteen professional cyclists, served as a catalyst for my rediscovery of George Orwell’s essay ‘The Sporting Spirit’. 

 

In it, he complained that ‘sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will’, which arouses ‘the most savage combative instincts’ in its participants and audiences. I generally tend (and probably too readily) to align myself with Orwell’s viewpoints, but, going into this investigation, I assumed that I would quite definitely disagree with his indictment: that sport is intrinsically and inevitably an agent of social entropy. 

 

Indeed, Orwell’s claim that ‘international level sport is frankly mimic warfare’ does feel hyperbolic, but just the briefest scan of its historical context  – the essay was written in 1945, on the back of a Soviet football team’s tour of Britain – can account for his strident wariness of sport’s hyper-nationalistic and combative tendencies. His assertion that ‘you play to win’ does, in the realm of high-level sport, remain fundamental, and feels ostentatiously obvious. 

 

We have become so used to sport’s existence as an accepted career option that Orwell’s surprise at the ‘kill-or-be-killed’ feudalism of sport feels naive. But sport has not existed as a financially viable profession for long; even as recently as the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, British sport was vehemently, inexorably amateur. It required John Major’s concerted campaign to channel National Lottery money into British sport to render our Olympians financially autonomous, finally released from their 9-5 jobs, a hard-fought financial battle which paved the way for the professionalisation of elite sport. 

 

On first reading, I was certain my response to Orwell’s trenchant critique of sport would be downright disagreement. From what I have been lucky enough to see and enjoy of the Cambridge sporting scene, it is clear that many of our athletes, regardless of ability, have the admirable knack of combining a healthily competitive team spirit with a wry and even self-deprecating sense of humour and perspective. It’s an especially healthy trait which complements the academic intensity of our university term times, allowing sport to largely remain free of too severe a pressure.

 

Naturally, high level sport demands sacrifice and dedication, but I have always felt that our athletes’ mature attitudes and our societies’ dual functions as sports club and social circle render them less susceptible to sliding into Orwell’s damning condemnation of sport’s brutality and its creation of ‘infuriated spectators’. 

 

Sport is undeniably an overwhelming force for good will, one of the most fundamental and oft-cited panaceas for human ailments, and at its best, produces the most precious opportunities, experiences and friendships possible. I am just old enough for the powerful, golden memories of London 2012 to feel like a foregone utopia of national harmony, the ‘happy and glorious games’, a scintillating showcase of British sporting primacy. The thrill of Super Saturday on the track and field, British cycling’s staggering 12 medals, the gymnasts’ effortless proficiency, Andy Murray’s prowess on the court and the Paralympians’ resounding triumphs doubtless spurred thousands of my generation to engage in sport. 

 

As an eight-year old, my view of the Games was certainly cast in a roseate profusion: the whole country was brimming with excited apprehension, the Olympics were plastered over the broadsheets, our primary school sports day embodied the country’s sporting enthusiasm in miniature, everyone was singing Gangnam Style and watching The Hunger Games, victory was in the air… But back then, the image of a union-jack-clad athlete was a more innocent, less provocative symbol than today, and as excitement grew with every billboard and wacky mascot advert, the Games felt increasingly collaborational – fuelled by and dependent on a network of 70,000 volunteer ‘Games Makers’. 

 

However, as Wordsworth (almost) said, 12 years have passed; 12 summers with the length of twelve long winters – since this golden era. Retrospect has clouded these historical victories, and sport suffered tremendously during the pandemic. Athletes who competed in London 2012 have since faced disgrace, doping charges and have disclosed damning revelations about their sporting governing bodies, welfare provision and coaching. The 2012 women’s 1500m final was actually labelled the ‘dirtiest race in history’ after six of the first nine runners were found guilty of drug cheating. 

 

Clearly, the sporting world was far from perfect at the time, but to my eight-year-old uncynical eye, and to the record-breaking 51.9 million Brits who watched the Games, plenty had clearly gone right. 2012’s magical age of sporting exuberance seems to have been lost somewhere along the thread of time, at some nebulous point inbetween Mo Farah and James Corden creating the ‘mobot’ and Farah’s links to Alberto Salazar coming to light. 

 

80-odd years on from Orwell’s words, but perhaps closer than ever to the dystopian futures he envisioned, hearing from a range of Cambridge’s student-athletes provides compelling and original ways to rethink and reflect upon his essay. Turning to the environs of university, where sport continues to flourish, can perhaps help us define what a ‘sporting spirit’ has come to signify. Afterall, mine is the generation which was growing up during the aforementioned early days of professionalised elite sport in Britain, the golden days of global sporting dynamism before the shattering political turmoil of recent years. 

 

I stayed close to home for my first few interviews, first speaking to a long-standing member of the Cambridge University Hare and Hounds, who discussed his relation to high-level running with refreshing honesty. Although inclined initially to ‘disagree’ with Orwell’s case and speak up for sport’s power to foster ‘international collaboration’ and ‘bridge boundaries’, he went on to interrogate his personal experience; he suggested that a significant part of an athlete’s competitivity is inherently combative, and often inescapably constitutes the of the ill-wishing of rivals, schadenfreude and exigent comparison to others. 

 

This is far from an alien concept, with Victoria Pendleton’s ‘war of words’ with Australian rival Anna Meares, Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier’s lifelong stream of diatribes, and Sebastian Coe and Linford Christie’s public animosity springing to mind as blatant  examples of the hostility bred through personal rivalries. Bradley Wiggins, speaking in the Cambridge Union last summer, was frank about his experience, claiming that elite athletes are ‘encouraged and enabled to be selfish’ and that the ‘world centres around you’ – ‘you become a dreadful person – well I did anyway’. He revealed that a coach told him to ‘put his family second’, and that sport’s advocacy of solipsistic self-promotion and obsessive aggression as a performance-enhancing necessity becomes ‘the norm’ over time.

 

My first interviewee went on to personalise his experience of sport’s reductive power, in its kinship with a win-at-all-costs selfishness. He testified to the dual ‘satisfaction or ridicule’ of inescapable sporting reactions, implying that a judgemental appraisal of athletes’ performances can merely serve as a vehicle for sugar-coated gossip, masked through the veil of performance analysis. He explicitly described the smug gratification felt following the failures of rivals, symptomatic of the self-generated pressure which athletics can inflict. 

 

These sentiments are undoubtedly felt, but rarely discussed in the sporting world, which seems to be of perennially undecided status: uncertain whether an individual’s subjectivity should be given voice, or whether sport should aim to merely be an apolitical showcase of training and tactics.

 

Wondering how elite sport translates into the ‘Sporting Spirit’ of Cambridge University, I steered our conversation towards the Hare and Hounds, questioning whether the club’s vast diversity of athletes, from beginners to semi-professionals, ever poses social issues. He felt that the club grapples – largely successfully – with a broadly ‘1 size fits all training programme’. He asserted that the club’s fundamentally blanket training is financially requisite, and although perhaps doesn’t quite allow for the optimum level of individualised training, does yield results and help foster the club’s celebrated culture of accessibility and flexibility. Ultimately my interviewee didn’t feel that the club’s variety of sporting levels was largely problematic, citing a possible social snideness or ‘superiority’ commensurate and ‘inevitable’ due to the automatic training divisions founded on running ability. 

 

The competing pressures of university sport was another point of interest; my interviewee suggested that perceived expectation stems largely from ourselves, highlighting the irony whereby a notoriously solo sport is heavily interested in the team result. However, he felt that this team spirit was an overwhelming virtue of Cambridge sport, alluding to the club’s ‘very strong social scene’ and wide array of social activities ranging in formality, from our annual dinner to cross-society swaps. 

 

The long-standing CUH&H member was refreshingly honest about the personal shortcomings which high-level sport can engender; and indeed, Orwell did cite ‘ill-will’ and ‘hostility’ as part of his lambasting critique. My interviewee’s ultimate prognosis was that Cambridge sport, in his experience, is taken very seriously, and – despite its potential at club-level to sometimes create impassioned, ‘up-in-arms’ conflicts and ‘frustrations’ – that sport is a brilliant cultural, unifying and personally positive pursuit.

 

Although the admission of sport’s imperfections was tacit in this interview, there was an understanding that sport will always reflect human flaws, as well as our most admirable moments. To hear a nuanced reflection on Cambridge’s sporting spirit highlighted the entrenchment of politics and subjectivity in a discipline – sport in general – which is perhaps too often desirous to exist as an apolitical, individual-void exhibition of physical power and skill. Sport must not apologise for its human status, its fundamental inseparability from human affairs and idiosyncrasies – and to respond to Orwell, surely the fact that sport does breed such extremes of feeling is testament to its power to move and inspire participants. 

 

Given his historical context, we can both forgive Orwell a degree of hyperbole, but also accept that he did have a point; sport is not, and can not be, a blissfully straightforward pursuit removed from pettiness, politics and human fallibility – no matter how much my eight-year-old self idealised and idolised it. Sportspeople and commentators shouldn’t apologise for sport’s coalescence with the personal and political, but should instead actively engage with the questions that confront it: questions of personality, culture, systemic issues and the sort of political tension that Orwell broaches when he mentions the ‘lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige’. 

 

Now, if you are partial to a bit of Usher, and really want more, my second article in this series will hear from and compare the testimonies of college sport committee members and the 2023 Hare and Hounds’ men’s captain.