Olympics!

“I didn’t set out to beat the world; I just set out to do my absolute best.” – Al Oerter, first athlete to win four gold medals at four successive Olympiads Whooo!

The Olympics have started! With a pretty spectacular, albeit lengthy, Opening Ceremony including the ‘Queen’ parachuting into the stadium with James Bond, I guess we can say the Olympics are shaping up to be another world beater.

The Olympics have come a far way from what it was in Ancient Greece when only male Greek nationals could’ve participated.
The competitors were all also stark naked! The games are no longer held in honour of Zeus, but as a global event where both male and female athletes compete to win honours for their countries.
In Ancient Greece, their ideal was to achieve perfect harmony by exercising both body and mind, and what better way to do that than through Art and Sport? While the annual Festival of Dionysus that showcased drama and art has disappeared, every four years we have the Olympics to remind us about the Greeks and their ideals.
When Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games in 1896, he proposed to include art and culture in the games and in fact, sculpture, painting and literature were included as competitions from 1912 to 1948! While those are no longer events, there are still plays, concerts and other cultural programmes being held in the athletes village. The opening ceremony itself was a celebration of British culture with JK Rowling reading Peter Pan, dozens of Mary Poppins descending from the sky around a massive Lord Voldemort, twirling their umbrellas and the development of England from a green rural land with cows and sheep to the changes brought by the industrial revolution was depicted.
Right here in Guyana, we’re no strangers to the concept of exercising both body and mind. When Britain introduced the Public School in 1847 with Queen’s College, it included its focus on academics and sports explicitly copied from the Greeks. So that’s why we have inter-house sports, right? But with our system, we have over a month’s worth of sports lumped together in the first term of the school year.
It’s kind of like saying, ‘OK let’s put all of the sports in the first term and get it out of the way so that we can focus on the important things like academics for the next two terms!” And here I thought that they were both supposed to be equally important.
Healthy mind in a healthy body and all that! Teaching kids to think like that is a bit disturbing really. Of course academics are very important but by just focussing on academics locks kids out of opportunities like sports scholarships to prestigious colleges. In fact, to get into most good universities, you need extra-curricular activities to get in – you can be a straight A student but that’s no guarantee that you’re getting into Oxford.
Team sports teach children how to work together as a team better than the multitude of group projects that teachers are now overly-fond of handing out.
Maybe the reason there’s more ruckus in schools is because the discipline that sports inculcates is missing for most of the school years. There are more reports of fights breaking out in schools. Kids get angry for many reasons; some kids are naturally more aggressive than others, and what better way for them to funnel their aggressive anger, than into sports? Athletic friends of mine have bowed out of sports because of the increasing pressure to focus more on academics.
We need to produce well-rounded students. We need to exercise both mind and body, remember? So let’s find a way to incorporate sports into the curriculum all year round.