The drive to commercialize sports and commoditize players may seem enormously powerful, but there is an equal and opposite force in sports that receives significantly less media attention, yet continues to grow just as inexorably. How should you describe it? We could call it the spirit and soul of the sport. The intrinsic value that cannot be measured in transfer fees, but which has a greater and much longer lasting value. Or just the magic of sport. It may never be the hot topic on Match of the Day, but sport can never divorce itself from the fundamental human experiences at its heart.
It’s why we all love to watch, play and participate in sports, whether it’s the battle between the two Lukes in the gripping final of the Darts World Championship, Roger Federer’s sublime shots at Wimbledon, or those moments of joy that an audience feels as they watch their favorite team do the impossible in the final seconds of extra time. We don’t always wonder what happens beyond the trophies and titles, but BBC sports presenter Simon Mundie has written a book to help us understand it better.
Mundie has interviewed hundreds of athletes on his podcast Life Lessons. He discovered that it wasn’t the medals that mattered most to his interviewees. It was a little less tangible, but much more powerful. Mundie has collected some of the best stories and derived the ideas from them in his book Champion Thinking: How to Find Success Without Losing Yourself.
Mundie explores themes such as ‘acceptance’, ‘unconscious beliefs’ and ‘the joy of losing yourself’. It’s no surprise that we had a strong connection on the podcast about my book The Long Win. In my own experiences of more than a decade as an Olympic athlete, I recognized the journey that began with chasing the medals that everyone around me said were most important quickly led to a search for greater meaning.
It’s a story repeated by so many athletes. Victoria Pendleton felt ’empty’ and ‘numb’ after winning gold at the Beijing Olympics. Andrew Strauss asked, “Is that it?” after his side became the world’s No. 1 Test team for the first time. Tyson Fury spoke about ‘the void’ the morning after beating world champion Wladimir Klitschko. Describing the destructive spiral of ‘constant chasing’, Adam Peaty said: ‘I always thought success and happiness were determined by the gold medal or the world record. I don’t try to live by that anymore.” England World Cup-winning fly-half Jonny Wilkinson spoke of his depression and hoped the next cap or title would bring joy, but in his own words: “it’s never enough”. Mundie considers what these athletes who reached the top positions in the sport were missing.
Wilkinson features in Mundie’s book and he has gone to great lengths to rethink sport. His podcast ‘I Am’ marks a journey of self-discovery through quantum physics, Buddhism and philosophy. Wilkinson, whose extra-time drop goal sailed over the crossbar to win the tournament for England in 2003, dismantles everything we think we know about sport as brutally as he once attacked his opponents on the pitch.
Wilkinson attacks the usual clichés that describe him as exceptionally dedicated, epitomized by the hours he spent practicing his goal kicks long after his teammates had gone home. He reveals how this obsessive behavior actually caused enormous wear and tear on his body and was driven by fear, insecurity and “a gap in self-confidence”.
Wilkinson and Mundie interviewed and became fascinated with the philosopher and ‘spiritual teacher’ Rupert Spira. Spira’s insights go about as far as what is discussed on the Match of the Day bank. Yet Spira offers answers to give sport meaning in a way that Wilkinson could never achieve with the final score and the endless caps and titles. Spira supports Mundie in his search for “the true gold of sport”, expanding his understanding of experiences of “flow” in sport.
Mundie’s final and most compelling chapter explores sporting moments of joy and transcendence, of inhuman possibility, of a greater form of intelligence, of the magic of the universe. Mundie references Wilkinson’s winning drop goal in 2003, Damon Hill’s incredible drive at Suzuka in 1994, Frankie Dettori’s seventh and final ride at Ascot in 1996 and Goldie Sayers’ euphoric experience throwing the javelin at the Beijing Olympics. In each of these moments, the athletes use similar language: Dettori says, “I felt like I was there, but I wasn’t there.” Hill says, “It’s like I wasn’t driving the car, something else was driving the car.” Wilkinson says: “It wasn’t me who kicked it – it was the knowing of it.”
Pioneering psychologist Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, who coined the term ‘flow’ for these moments of beauty, described this as a ‘transformation of time’. It is the ultimate human of time travel available to all of us in these moments. It’s easy to see how we all long for that in our lives.
Mundie’s writing resonates and expresses what I felt instinctively but didn’t always know how to explain. When asked to share the best moment of my rowing career, others expect the answer to be a medal-winning race. But my thoughts always turn to some truly joyful moments during a training camp on a beautiful Italian lake, surrounded by mountains, where suddenly things clicked and our rowboat took off, moving along seemingly effortlessly even though we were rowing flat out.
Spira explains experiences of fans and spectators who feel inspired by witnessing a greater force in the game. He reinterprets that moment when the audience feels deep joy when a goal is scored. He explains that our minds tell us that it is because a goal is scored and we associate joy with scoring a goal, which is further reinforced by commentators and others around us.
But Spira interprets that moment differently. Until that moment, we were focused on waiting for a moment when we wanted it to happen, waiting for a goal. When the goal is actually achieved, it is the release and relief from that expectation that creates the joy. We no longer suspend our joy until something happens in the future. We can freely connect with the present moment. By being so intensely present and connected, we lose the sense of being separate individuals and feel part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s powerful stuff, a world away from the typical sofa expert we get.
Related: Sports is not just about winning; it can also teach us lessons about life
The mindfulness-based programs that The True Athlete Project (a brilliant sports organization that I support) offer to elite athletes, coaches, grassroots sports clubs and leaders in sport are sometimes derided. Leaders assume that athletes won’t be interested in exploring their intrinsic values or identities outside of sport, or that coaches won’t be interested in connecting with the work they do beyond winning games. But time and time again, the CEO, Sam Parfitt, is overwhelmed by the instinctive connection with this approach and the sense of relief at finding what they have been missing for so long. Performance expert Owen Eastwood described his work developing high-performing teams as a “spiritual challenge” and said that despite warnings that players would resist his approach, he had yet to find an athlete who did not long to connect with something bigger. than themselves.
Sports are a natural context for human innovation. Many athletes and coaches realize that our physical limits are finite, but there is still so much to be gained by exploring the mind more deeply. I hope that in 2024 our commentators, journalists and experts will also take a moment to challenge the assumptions they make about what has the most value in the sport that lies ahead. Mundie’s book gives them a good starting point to explore this further. And I’d love to see Spira on Lineker’s Match of the Day bench.
Champion Thinking: Finding Success Without Losing Yourself is published by Bloomsbury Tonic for £18.99. Buy it at Guardianbookshop.com for £16.71