Sir, - On the same page as your second Editorial of September 16th, "The Glory of Sport", you published a letter from Alison Bernstein headed "The Sporting Spirit".
While your text reminisces on the genesis and history of the Olympic Games, what a great festival of athletic prowess they represent, and how they will rivet over 3.5 billion viewers to their television screens, hers deplores the compulsion to win being drilled into those training for competitive events.
Certainly, evidence of the compulsion is manifest. Apart from drug-taking (which is invisible unless it is discovered), cheating, protesting players, brutality in team games and humiliation of opponents are acceptable contemporary practices, seemingly encouraged by coaches and applauded by supporters. Wins are celebrated by extravagant, triumphant demonstrations designed to highlight the inadequacies of the losers and intensify their residual pain.
The canny Bard of Avon predicted its scale in Henry IV when King Henry observed to Prince Hal: "Nothing can seem foul to those that win" - a sentiment enshrined in the idiom "no holds barred", the origin of which is often mistakenly attributed to wrestling. In fact, it comes from a proof-reader of Shakespeare's whose curiosity was aroused by King Henry's words, inserting in the margin the query, "no holds, Bard?".
A couple of centuries after Shakespeare, the poet William Cowper, in his work The Task III, revealed what would surely be his attitude to the Olympic Games when he wrote: "Detested sport,/ That owes its pleasures to another's pain".
An endorsement for losers, indeed, and one which Ian Thorpe, the wonder 17-year-old Australian swimmer predicted to win five gold medals for his country, who was beaten into second place by the Dutchman Van den Hoogenbrand, would not forget if he heard of it. Van den Hoogenbrand was not noted for his reticence in victory. - Yours, etc.,
Michael Carr, Ashurst Apartments, Mount Merrion Avenue, Blackrock, Co Dublin.