Competitive Sports is one of the incredible miracles to me and I love them greatly. I can watch almost any competition where the good sportsmanship is real (Feel free to imagine here your own doping/cheating/stupid exceptions), but there is one thing I can never understand.
WE WON
My countries top athletes football team has won European Football Championship (in 2016) and ever since then I hear from my fellow countrymen the phrase “WE WON EURO 2016 !”, “Portugal is the Euro-Championship and we are the best europeans!”, “We have shown the europe where the best football players are!”
I do not know where the best players are. I have not won European championship (because I was not called to take part in the national team – and that’s good, because I am quite old & useless as a football player currently)
Once António Guterres became Secretary-General of the United Nations, my social networks flooded with messages from seemingly intelligent people “This is the happiest day of my life!”, “We have finally re-established ourselves as the world power”, “We have won United Nations” (no comment for the last one, really).
I am not proud, because I did nothing for this event to take place. I did not participate in any way.
THEY LOST
After winning the EURO 2016, the portuguese national team (24 players), have lost their first official game agains Switzerland (in the competition to participate in the world cup 2018),
and almost every single person in Portugal went saying “The team has lost”, “They have lost”, “I told them to be careful”, etc
How interesting is it ? How wonderful is the separation of the victory and the loss …
The same applies to the politics – “We have good people, but we are poor because of bad politicians (that we keep on voting on)”.
My thoughts
How interesting this whole “We Won” vs “They Lost” …
Is it like IF they win, then it was us (who are us? how do we define us? 11/24 athletes vs 10.5 million people). Portugal/any country/adepts of a specific club did mostly nothing for those athletes to win.
And IF they lost, then it was just them, those 11/24 athletes! We have no guilt, it’s their fault!
Ladies & Gentlemen, how intelligent is this ?
I, myself have not won any international competition ever. PERIOD.
Nor have I lost anything if some people win/loose some certain competition.
Let us focus on delivering the value (as in enabling new things), love & compassion to this world, instead.
And yeah, I will be screaming till loosing my voice for the athletes of my country by every competition – knowing, that I want simply to see the brilliance in people, especially my local country people.