Celebrating Losing
It has been interesting observing the reaction to the NZ football team's 4-0 loss to World Cup favourites Brazil overnight. Described as a "valiant effort" with talkback radio hosts gushing over the start of a new era in NZ football where apparently we are already on the road to South Africa 2010.
It is a great example of New Zealand's sporting pysche - where our reaction to a sporting performance is judged by the expectation we have prior to the event taking place. Whether we win or lose has nothing to do with it, after all, no-one expected the All Whites to win or get even close, so to lose by "only" 4 goals has been seen as a "good" effort.
If we look back over the year so far, I cannot help but compare this reaction to the one received by our Commonwealth Games athletes. Thanks to our government sporting body SPARC, the "expectation" placed on these athletes (publicised through the media and implicitly accepted by the public) of 45 medals was not met so the sporting performance at the CG was a "failure".
In some respects, I'm glad to see the reaction to the All Whites' effort because it does show we can celebrate a losing sporting performance. Why then, couldn't we accept that some of the 31 fourth-placed finishes we had at the Commonwealth Games were also performances that deserved some congratulations? We can't have it both ways. Is our Sports Minister Hon Mallard going to now come out and question the mental toughness of our footballers? After all, they lost, they are not helping our country fulfil SPARC's high performance vision of "winning consistently", so why should we be happy?
Hopefully one day we will reach some consistency in our reaction to our sporting achievements, and realise that high performance sport is more about continuous improvement than "winning".
P.S. While on the subject of celebrating losing, I'd like to celebrate the loss of the Australian orienteers to their New Zealand counterparts over the weekend :-)
P.P.S. Simon Barnes of the (UK) Times is IMO an outstanding sporting journalist - his take on winning and losing can be found here
It is a great example of New Zealand's sporting pysche - where our reaction to a sporting performance is judged by the expectation we have prior to the event taking place. Whether we win or lose has nothing to do with it, after all, no-one expected the All Whites to win or get even close, so to lose by "only" 4 goals has been seen as a "good" effort.
If we look back over the year so far, I cannot help but compare this reaction to the one received by our Commonwealth Games athletes. Thanks to our government sporting body SPARC, the "expectation" placed on these athletes (publicised through the media and implicitly accepted by the public) of 45 medals was not met so the sporting performance at the CG was a "failure".
In some respects, I'm glad to see the reaction to the All Whites' effort because it does show we can celebrate a losing sporting performance. Why then, couldn't we accept that some of the 31 fourth-placed finishes we had at the Commonwealth Games were also performances that deserved some congratulations? We can't have it both ways. Is our Sports Minister Hon Mallard going to now come out and question the mental toughness of our footballers? After all, they lost, they are not helping our country fulfil SPARC's high performance vision of "winning consistently", so why should we be happy?
Hopefully one day we will reach some consistency in our reaction to our sporting achievements, and realise that high performance sport is more about continuous improvement than "winning".
P.S. While on the subject of celebrating losing, I'd like to celebrate the loss of the Australian orienteers to their New Zealand counterparts over the weekend :-)
P.P.S. Simon Barnes of the (UK) Times is IMO an outstanding sporting journalist - his take on winning and losing can be found here
Labels: opinion
posted by Rob Crawford at 4:57 PM
1 Comments:
The english have done it for years in rugby....
Then they won the world cup.
Theres a lesson to be learnt there somewhere.
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