At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, environmental issues were officially placed on the world-wide political agenda. This striving for a solid basis for a sustainable world resulted in 1999 in the Earth Summit Agenda 21, a blueprint for a balanced and integrated approach to environmental and developmental issues into the next millennium. At the Centennial Olympic Congress (1994), the International Olympic Committee (IOC) took up the gauntlet and began to develop its own ‘green’ ideology. From then on next to ‘excellence’ and ‘friendship’, also ‘respect’ (apparently for the environment in its entirety) officially became a third pillar of Olympianism. This resulted in programmatically putting forward an environmentally conscious conception of sport and declaring the responsibility “to promote a positive39 legacy from the Olympic Games to the
host cities and host countries” (IOC 2012, p. 5). Although in the report the IOC is aware of the quite ambitious character of its sustainability strivings, the organization doesn’t shun to be self-confident about its ability to bring about a change for the better.
There are those who believe that this is an impossible dream—as many doubted that the sub- 1(sic!40) minute mile or sub-10 second 100 metres would ever be achieved. However, the IOC
understands that if it is to fulfill its aim to ‘Create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles’ there is no other option (p. 94).
The idea of unbridled progress as a mean for a better world is paramount in Olympianism. The IOC even suggests to transform its ideal of athletic excellence—as expressed in the official Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius; ever running faster, jumping higher and getting stronger—into a sustainability panacea. “It is to be hoped that future achievements in the drive to foster widespread sustainable development will inspire a great many people across the globe. That way we truly incorporate the ethos of Olympism—faster, higher and stronger for a sustainable future” (p. 94).
This optimistic view on sport as a progressive and potent enhancer for societal change has been paramount since the beginning of the modern Olympic movement. The idea of Olympianism as a
religio athletae,“a secular, vitalistic ‘humanism of the muscles’” (Loland 1995, p. 66) that is supposed to
bring about a change for the better, already has been poetically expressed by founding father Pierre de Coubertin at the very year of the first modern Olympics in Athens in 1896.
Healthy democracy, wise and peaceful
internationalism, will penetrate the new stadium and preserve within the cult of honour and
disinterestedness which will enable athletics to help in the tasks of moral education and social peace as well as of muscular development (cited in Loland 1995, p. 49)
As a contemporary topical follow-up for De Coubertin’s optimistic moral activism, as of 1994 the IOC strives for Olympic Games that are as energy neutral as possible. As a consequence of this formalised striving we could have had ‘green’ Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010. Were it not that for an unexpected lack of snow-fall in ski-resort Whistler highly energy consuming and loads of carbon emitting snow-cannons had to be flown in from all over the world to let the (in case quasi-hibernal) Games go on.41
Environmental responsibility meanwhile even seems to have become a common denominator in sport at large. As a consequence of this blossoming consciousness we have had a fairly green Grand
Départ of the Tour de France in Rotterdam, also in 2010. We also have the promise that the FIFA World
Cup 2022 in Qatar will take place in an eco-friendly soccer utopia. There is green golf (less herbicides), green tennis (more durable tennis balls), and green ice-hockey (low energy consumption buildings).
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And of course outdoor sports such as mountain-biking (don’t leave litter, stay on the sign-posted tracks) and trail-running (bring your own cup to refuel at the energy stations) are often labelled as green.
Still, beyond the usual window dressing, one may question: what’s in it for life at large? The clash of the praise of the wild and concrete behaviour to satisfy the human need for the pristine is epitomized by the hipster in lumberjack, dropped in the sheer endless Canadian pine-woods by a chartered helicopter. To concretize and personalize the strained relation between thoughts and acts and head and heart further, taking a look at Richard Branson seems appropriate. This venture capitalist combines running a record company not only with aircraft discounting,42 sponsoring Formula 1 racing
and promoting space travelling, but also with trans-ocean kite-surfing, therefore calling himself a true environmentalist, unselfishly caring for the well-being of planet earth. Meanwhile even Formula 1 race car driver Lewis Hamilton has called for taking more care of the environment: “Little by little we kill our planet. We humans are not a very good species.”43 This is rather ironical, if not cynical, since one
can hardly think of a sport more polluting than car racing. Who is this ‘we’? What about personal responsibility, exemplary conduct and concrete action?
Branson’s environmental Janus face and Hamilton’s uncommitted sigh seem to confirm Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) famous critique of ‘Das Man’ (the They) in Being and Time (2008): “The ‘who’ is not this one, not that one, not oneself [man selbst], not some people [einige], and not the sum of them all. The ‘who’ is the neuter, the They [das Man]”(p. 164). Or: “Everyone is the other, and no-one is himself”(p. 165). Who is meant by ‘the They’? Everyone? The arithmetical mean of all opinions, including those on the extremes?44 Or is ‘the They’ more of a moi commun, a pluralis majestatis,
a generalised I which at a closer look represents the particular meaning of a specific person or author who refuses to take personal responsibility?
Warily hovering between the dull average mean and the brilliant special case is a major asset of practical philosophy. Other than fundamental ontology and meta-ethics, a true philosophy of the true praxis, and hence practical ethics, thrive by well-contextualized N=1-observations, since these have a maximum declarative potency. This is cynically captured in Stalin’s famous dictum that one dead soldier is a tragedy, while a million dead soldiers are just statistics.45 Of course, there always
remains an obligation to hop over from anecdotal vividness to societal robustness. However, although necessary in practical philosophy, in the end the broader empirical turn in itself never is sufficient. I contend that a practical philosopher may start with an anecdote, i.e. a singled out observation that
42 “Air travel has the highest specific impact on short-term warming, while on long-term warming car travel has an equal or higher impact per passenger-kilometer.” (Borken-Kleefeld e.a. 2010, p. 5700).
43 “Little by little we kill our planet” (Bloemhof 2017, my translation).
44 In the case of Heidegger it seems as if his ideas are rather singled-out thoughts formulated against the very idea of a ‘regression to the mean’. This in the social sciences widespread statistical technique has turned into the very opposite of the original intention of the founder of the statistical analysis Francis Galton, who coined his calculative analysis ‘regression to the mediocre’ (1886). Galton was in search of Heriditary Genius (1892), the exceptional, not in the dull mediocre “sum of them all”.
45 This conviction is also uttered by Mr. Van Arkady in Paul Theroux’s novel Half moon street (1984). Van Arkady argues that there are only 5.000 people in the world that really matter. The rest is literally meaningless, and thus non-existent. “I believe the death of one man can change the course of history, when it is the right man and when we are fully conscious of it. But a million don’t matter, because it isn’t a number in any actual sense, unless it is applied to money” ( p. 7).
initially raised his or her attention (often a discomforting and alienating one), subsequently tap the wider empirical angle, indeed, but, finally, has to depict an overarching meta-empirical perspective on the issue at stake.
Following this initially quasi-anecdotal but finally meta-empirical trajectory is the philosophical line of reasoning of this study. In the following Chapter Answering three Ecosophical Questions: Asceticism I will try to answer Sigmund Loland’s burning questions by focussing on asceticism46 and endurance
sport. Metabletics, or historical phenomenology, is a specific case of the quasi-anecdotal method that will be put to the test in Chapter 4: Metabletics of Spinal Sport: When Poion meets Poson. In Chapter 5 Ascetic
Practices, Hermeneutical Cycles and Ecosophical Endurance hermeneutics will be assessed as a tool for carving
out a deeper meaning of sustainable (endurance) sport. In Chapter 6 Continental Pragmatism: Enduring
Life in the Strenuous Mood pragmatism will be added as a plan de campagne for a more sustainable take on
sport. In Chapter 7, On Agon and Ecosophical Endurance: Finding your own Pace, the phenomenological- metabletical, hermeneutical and pragmatic impetuses developed earlier will be integrated and applied to an appropriate contemporary form of agonism: sub-elite endurance sport, especially cycling. In Chapter 8,entitled Epilogue: Turning in the Widening Gyre, I, finally, will reflect on what best may be coined a personal, quasi-anecdotal bicyclical reflective reflexivity. Arduously pedalling for meaning, this is the thread of this poly-pragmatic philosophical study.