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Given that the value of inclusive principles is predicated upon respecting the personhood of the persons being accommodated, it is important to be able to defend the assertion that individuals not receiving the scarce benefits of sport participation are not being demeaned or diminished as a result. This is especially true of those individuals who are not even being allocated the opportunity to compete at CURCs due to their inferior skill or ability as demonstrated in try-out processes, but simply receive the admittedly more marginal benefits of having the option to participate in team selection processes. Torbjörn Tännsjö outlines potential harms suffered by the losers of athletic contests in his article “Is Our Admiration for Sport Heroes Fascistoid?”

When we base out interest in sports on a more direct fascination for the individual winners of these events - we move … [to] a contempt for weakness. … It is one thing to admire the person who wins the victory, who shows off as the strongest, but another thing to feel contempt for those who do not win (and turn out to be weak). I believe, however, that in doing the one thing, we cannot help but do the other. When we celebrate the winner, we cannot help but feel contempt for those who do not win (Tännsjö 2007, 433).

Tännsjö’s argument regarding our interest in or fascination with the winners of sporting events is very similar to Breivik’s points, cited earlier, about how maintaining diversity among competitors helps to ensure an interesting contest with a satisfying outcome. However, it is within this outcome that Tännsjö identifies the potential for discriminatory

attitudes towards others. This is problematic for the general thrust of this paper, which is in support of human rights and autonomy. By looking for differences between athletes in an effort to discover the individual characteristics that enable them to win, anyone who attempt to interpret sporting outcomes is searching for what makes victorious athletes:

… excellent, and their excellence is what makes them valuable; that is why we admire them. Their excellence is, in an obvious manner, based on the strength they exhibited in the competition. … So if we see a person as especially valuable, because of his excellence, and if the excellence is a manifestation of strength (in a very literal sense), then this must mean that other people, who do not win the fair competition, those who are comparatively weak, are less valuable. The most natural feeling associated with this value judgement is – [sic] contempt (Tännsjö 2007, 433).

As a whole, Tännsjö’s criticism relies on the ability of an audience to establish identifiable differences between competitors. Although Breivik supports encouraging diversity among competitors in order to create more meaningful competition, Tännsjö would warn that any increase in the level or intensity of competition carries the risk of increasing the prevalence of discriminatory attitudes and actions as well. The type of discrimination that concerns Tännsjö, however, is not entirely typical. Tännsjö would not suggest that including para-athletes in the CURCs might result in discrimination among identifiable communities, for instance between able-bodied and para-athletes. Instead, Tännsjö is arguing that audiences of sporting events discriminate against all losers, in whatever category they compete in. Extrapolating Tännsjö’s concerns yields the conclusion that including para-events in the CURC might, paradoxically, increase discrimination against individuals with disabilities from audiences and other spectators.

It is easy to see how, in a search to identify the unique qualities of the victor that enabled them to be successful, spectators of sporting contests could carelessly express or accept attitudes of contempt towards those who do not have those qualities. The

process through which this could take place is well documented in human rights law and is called ‘indirect discrimination,’ as described below. Human rights law is applicable to this issue because the premise of this paper requires establishing a view of sporting practices through a human rights perspective. Indirect discrimination “involves the application of some practice or requirement that is neutral on its face … but which has the effect of treating an individual or group differently” (Mize 2007, 28). Within a sport context, it would likely be argued by Tännsjö that the standard of excellence by which the winner is determined is the neutral requirement that ends with unfair treatment for the losing party.50 Therefore, the questions that Tännsjö is truly asking is how can we distinguish between discrimination and meritocracy? And are the competitive principles we are using to award victors harming losers in any way?

Examples of discrimination and meritocracy, in the context of human rights, have been studied in the workplace (Martin et. al, 2014; Wilson 2014; Castilla & Bernard 2010). Working environments, especially in capitalist societies, and sport settings have much in common. Returning to English’s basic and scarce benefits in sport, one could argue that all employees receive certain considerations for their time (a salary, a safe working environment, etc.) that would classify as basic benefits, while at the same time are in competition with each other for those benefits that are necessarily scarce

(promotions, pay raises, etc.). The problem of differentiating meritocracy from discrimination can be summarized as follows:

Put simply, the ideal of meritocracy presumes that opportunity is awarded based on individual merit rather than inherited status. The meritocracy ideal is congruent with other fundamental American values: upward mobility and individualism are

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For more information about the concept of ‘standards of excellence’ in sport, see Chapter Two.

both core values of the American Dream; they legitimate our democratic ideal of equal opportunity for all. In the employment context, the meritocracy ideal is founded on two interconnected beliefs: that employment discrimination is an anomaly and that merit alone determines employment success. (Power 2008, 2158).

The appeal of viewing sport as a meritocracy follows many of the same patterns as those noted as being highly persuasive in the workplace. In the article “On Winning and Athletic Superiority”, Nicholas Dixon reflected on what makes for a satisfying or

unsatisfying contest, and what causes athletic contests to fail to achieve their comparative purpose. He asserted that athletes and spectators wish to believe that:

in the ideal contest, victory is determined primarily by the qualities that are central to athletic excellence: skill, strategy, effort, and psychological toughness. This requires that competitive sport exemplify equality of opportunity - athletic meritocracy - by enacting those rules that reward those qualities that constitute athletic excellence (Dixon 2008, 254).

The belief in the prevalence of a meritocratic system in sport, much like in the workplace, legitimizes our belief in the value of the activity, and especially the fairness of the result. If sport were not meritocratic, then winning would lack any value since it would not reflect well on the abilities of the participants. Defeat also would be stripped of its educational significance. Unfortunately, the persuasiveness of the ideal of meritocracy makes determining whether or when it verges into discrimination extremely difficult. Many people possess a “cognitive desire to view our society, the organizations of which we are a part, and ourselves as just and legitimate” (Power 2008, 2157). This is known as the “just world phenomenon” and it is a convincing pattern of thinking, and also a known fallacy, because it allows individuals to rationalize negative events that would otherwise be very disturbing if they were thought to happen randomly (Power 2008, 2157). By convincing ourselves that victory or defeat in athletic contests is arrived at in a just fashion, we can accept and understand our disappointment with poor results, or

excitement with good ones, much more readily than if the outcome of the contest was entirely random. However our inclination to believe in the justice of outcomes, in order to better understand our own lived experience, means that it may be practically impossible to distinguish between meritocracy and discrimination except in very egregious cases. Therefore, I suggest that athletes are incentivized to ignore certain elements of

unfairness within their contests, because by having participated they have a vested interest in believing that a just outcome has been delivered otherwise their time in playing the game has been wasted. This is especially true for the victors of any athletic contest, or even those who have simply enjoyed themselves or derived some other positive benefit from it. Applying this situation to Tännsjö’s arguments yields the interesting idea that not only is it difficult to disprove his assertion that audiences are inspired by the meritocratic nature of athletic contests to discriminate against the

loser(s), but also that the loser(s) are likely inclined to believe that audiences are correct in doing so. Therefore, completely dismissing Tännsjö’s potential objections to my arguments is not possible and it is likely that there is some element of contempt intrinsic in the spectatorship of competitive sport, even if it was oriented around respecting autonomy as I am suggesting.