Sports, heroics & philanthropy.

(Inspired by BBC Sports Personality of the Year)

The essential for the modern professional sports person is to excel and exceed, achieving, through hard work and natural talent, the apparently unachievable. Marc Marquez, Usain Bolt, Bradley Wiggins to name but three.

It seems, in an age where Victorian values are often denigrated, the Victorian value of edification through hard work still holds sway.

The role of sport as entertainment takes this virtue and adds to it the temptation of vanity. Vanity as a function of a god given gift, hard work notwithstanding, seems all the more tasteless, a misappropriation of a product of nature not endeavour.

Clearly this is no easy line to tread. To be adulated by a media which simplifies and personifies the story, under an ever stronger microscope, down to 140 characters or less. The worship of these heroes, about whom we know both so little and so much places the heroes themselves in an awkward position. To choose humility and genuine recognition of the role of others is hard. To choose vanity and arrogance is both transparent and foolish.

This is an ill-made match - the hero is a hero by instinct, yet entertainment is a calculation to benefit sponsors. Froome’s instinct is to attack and this is what we want from him. Everything else is immaterial, his self-effacing attitude may not be media savvy, but this is not our business. It is, literally, someone else’s business.

Beware the story told for the gain of the teller and not the hero, and in this sporting melee understand the responsibility of the inspiration we take.

Inspiration is the legacy of the hero, appealing to a fundament within us. This is what we take into our own experience, to emulate or exceed. There is within us a feeling of a wider benefit, something to share, an ethereal experience, a taste of divinity hidden deep in our humanity. Sir Brad in his outraged tirade against the bone idle responds not only to groundless criticism, but also, by implication, to the failure to share in and to relate to this basic human experience. This is what we give to society through our participation and this is what we want to receive.