2023-07-17 17:22:45
Elite sport requires great sacrifices. Some young people lose adolescence to try to fulfill their dreams. Or those of their parents, who on many occasions are the ones who force their children into a life of sacrifices to try to be the best. Effort is one of the great values associated with formative sport. Also competitiveness, a much more multifaceted and controversial concept, and which is accepted in different environments and based on certain standards. Not all formative sport has to be competitive.
In the series of reports on the abuses at La Masia that ARA published last week, there were many ex-football players who also talked about what it means to compete in a club like Barça or the hardship of leaving home at the age of 12 to go – go live in Barcelona all alone. Most of them have great memories, but for some the experience was very hard. We have become accustomed to reading success stories that bring us closer to the life of sacrifices of athletes who end up succeeding, the review they make of their past, of how they abandoned friends, naivety, innocence, love – the youth that evaporates so quickly, for the children themselves, but also for the parents–…, to be able to train almost like automatons programmed only to compete. For all of them the path was painful. Training before birthday parties. Get up early to go to the pool for two hours before starting school. Weekends with no family outing to go do a one-minute test in a ramshackle pavilion in an ugly, depressing industrial town. The examples are endless. However, at least they reached the goal, the journey was worth it because they ended up achieving what they longed for – or what their parents longed for – and the reconstruction of that stage is based on the good times. Selective memory. In some cases, however, the stories are not so sweet. For example, Openthe biography of Andre Agassi.
Giving up (part of) childhood to (try to) succeed as an athlete comes at a very high cost. In other areas of life (social, cultural or even academic) it is not so widespread. Choosing this path also has good things; the residents of La Masia listed arguments. “That way they know what everything costs”, argue the defenders of this model. “We overprotect them too much,” they add. They are probably partly right, a point of competitiveness can become educational, but in any case, sacrificing a child’s childhood to turn him into a perfect machine for hitting the ball, doing strokes in the pool or somersaults in a tatami is an issue that our society must rethink.
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