Malcolm's Reviews > In Praise of Athletic Beauty

Gumbrecht's fundamental premise is that there is a reason for watching sport and writing about sport that doesn't try to make it about something else. He's right, of course, for many the experience of sport is simply about sport, about body movement, about pleasure.

Even though I teach in a sports programme I am not at all 'sporty' and don't particularly like it – but I still derive pleasure from watching sport-done-well. I won't dwell on Gumbrecht's historical content – it is always unfair for a specialist to use their own field to critique a non-specialist. It may offend my philosopher friends that I particularly like the chapter on 'fascinations', and his case that we derive pleasure in sport from watching bodies move and perform, from a sense of suffering in sports performance, from the grace of sport, from the interaction of athletes and their performance tools (I see in this my appreciation of equestrian sports), from aesthetic form, and from well-timed plays (this last is two issues for Gumbrecht – plays and timing). I see in his case a basis for some of my appreciation of the thing I work with professionally – sport.

However, and alas, so many of his examples draw on material that is culturally defined and dependent (he admits that) that the sorts of claims being made for sport qua sport are hard to sustain: quite simply, the meaning of sport, the pleasure of sport, lies in the interaction of the sprots practice and its cultural and social contexts that give it meaning. The case is elegantly made but in the long run Gumbrecht's abstraction of sport from its socio-cultural makers of meaning result it being less compelling than it at first appears. (There is a very good collection of critical essays in Sport in History, the first issue of 2008.)