Article

Comment

Sport

12 July 2023

3 min read

Winning the emotional whole in elite sport

As the pressure builds at Wimbledon, Jonny Reid and Graham Daniels reflect on the psychology vulnerabilities sports stars face.

Jonny Reid and Graham Daniels

Johnny and Graham work for Christians in Sport. Graham, is the General Director, while Jonny is the Resources and Communications Team Leader.

A tennis player stands ready to return a shot, while a phalanx of photographers crowd round a court-side opening to take a picture of him.

Photo by Howard Bouchevereau on Unsplash.

“It’s tough to be happy in tennis because every single week, everyone loses apart from one person.”
Taylor Fritz – American World Number 9 tennis player

Wimbledon is one of the pinnacles of the tennis season as players long to win the prestigious tournament. Yet only a handful will experience success. The vast majority will fail in their goal and return to the treadmill of elite touring sport.

These players were once the best in their town, state or country, yet now they face the relentless pressure of competing against hundreds of others who were ‘best-in-class.’

Former US Open champion Bianca Andreescu struggled to come to terms with this reality when she turned professional. Speaking in the Netflix documentary series Break Point, she said:

“When I started losing, I didn’t know what was happening in a way. I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was shocked, which was really weird because people are losing every single week in tennis.”

The shame of losing

Andre Agassi has written one of the most illuminating autobiographies of any sportsperson, where he recounts how by the age of seven, he associated winning tournaments with safety from the potential rage and disappointment of his highly driven father.

However, having won Wimbledon at the age of 22, he discovered that even winning one of the biggest tournaments in his sport could not heal his wounds and the need to find satisfaction and worth in his performance. He said after his victory:

“winning changes nothing. Now that I’ve won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn’t feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn’t last as long as the bad. Not even close.”

Like all humans, elite athletes need to know they have value and significance not based on what they have done or will do in the future but on who they are.

More recently Emma Raducanu, the British 2021 US Open Champion reflected on how she had become trapped in a similar view of her tennis.

"I very much attach my self-worth to my achievements,"

she said.

"If I lost a match I would be really down, I would have a day of mourning, literally staring at the wall. I feel things so passionately and intensely."

Ashley Null is an experienced sports chaplain who has worked with Olympians and high-level sportspeople for many years. In reflecting on the story of Agassi, he notes:

“The first task of any chaplain to elite athletes is to help them learn to separate their personal identity from their athletic performance. Only love has the power to make human beings feel truly significant, not achievement. Only knowing that they are loved regardless of their current performance can make Olympians feel emotionally whole.”

How to feel emotionally whole in elite sport

Current professional player Shelby Rogers has noted that in elite tennis:

“Week to week, you’re walking around with your ranking plastered on your face.”

They cannot seem to escape their performances.

Like all humans, elite athletes need to know they have value and significance not based on what they have done or will do in the future but on who they are. Most of us do not have our work watched by millions and instantly ranked and analysed. But for elite athletes, these pressures mean they are especially vulnerable to insecurity and are much more likely to conflate identity with performance. Thus, a stable and secure identity is critical for the sportsperson.

Sports psychology has begun to understand this need and now encourages athletes to think more broadly about how they find their worth and value. Rebecca Levett has worked in a number of high-performance environments and acknowledges that:

“It is absolutely vital that we, as support staff and coaches encourage our athletes to consider who they are as a person as well as an athlete.”

For most of us our ‘private identity,’ as Levett calls it, could be derived from our family and friends and how they see us. Several athletes reference their role as husband or wife or mother and father as key in their success. Meanwhile, others, recognising that not even family relationships are permanent or always fulfilling, have turned to Christian faith for this stability.

Shelby Rogers recently spoke on a podcast about the difference understanding this has had on her tennis career.

“As much as you try not to read the media, you still have that constant comparison, and so it is understanding within yourself that you do not have to prove yourself to God…that you do not have to perform for him…you just have to go out and enjoy yourself and use these gifts he’s given you.”

The Christian message is that a secure identity can be found in God's assured, steadfast love, as a Father has for his children.

Sport is a beautiful gift, but it is not stable enough to define us.

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Culture

Politics

3 December 2024

5 min read

The assisted dying debate revealed the real role of Parliament

MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

An MP stands and speaks in a parliamentary debate.

MP Diane Abbott speaks in the debate.

Parliament TV.

What would be the effect of allowing assisted suicide for those ‘people who lack agency, the people who know what it is to be excluded from power and to have decisions made for them’, asked Danny Kruger MP, as he wrapped up his speech? ‘What are the safeguards for them? Let me tell the House: we are the safeguard—this place; this Parliament; you and me. We are the people who protect the most vulnerable in society from harm, yet we stand on the brink of abandoning that role.’

His words capture an important aspect of Friday’s debate: what is the point of Parliament? Do MPs meet to turn public opinion polls into policies? If the majority are in favour of something, do MPs have nothing left to do but to follow the public and sort out the fine details? We might instinctively say ‘Yes!’ It seems right and democratic to treat those whom we elect as people we select and send to do our bidding. And the polls do seem to show the majority of people supporting assisted suicide, at least in principle – although there are good reasons to be sceptical about those figures and about the conclusions drawn from them.

But there are numerous times when the majority are known to be in favour of something but politicians refuse to endorse it. Polls repeatedly show that a majority are in favour of reintroducing the death penalty. Why might it be right for MPs sometimes to ignore what the purported majority thinks and to use their own judgement?

Because Parliament is not just a debating chamber.

An older way of referring to it was to call it the ‘High Court of Parliament’ because ‘parliament, classically, was where individuals could seek the redress of grievances through their representatives,’ as law lecturer Dr Robert Craig writes. It performed its function admirably in response to the Horizon scandal: a legitimate grievance was brought to its attention, and it responded to redress the wrongs done to the sub-postmasters by passing a law to ‘overturn a series of judgments that could only have been obtained, and were only obtained, by a toxic, captured and wilfully blind corporate culture’.

Friday’s debate featured many MPs who understood what they were there to do. They acknowledged the ‘terrible plight of the people who are begging us for this new law’ as Danny Kruger said. But they also spoke up for those who were in danger of being harmed and wronged by the bill: the disabled and the dying, and all the vulnerable who were not there to speak on their own behalf.

Many echoed the concerns expressed by Diane Abbott about coercion: ‘Robust safeguards for the sick and dying are vital to protect them from predatory relatives, to protect them from the state and, above all, to protect them from themselves. There will be those who say to themselves that they do not want to be a burden. … Others will worry about assets they had hoped to leave for their grandchildren being eroded by the cost of care. There will even be a handful who will think they should not be taking up a hospital bed.’ And evidence of coercion is hard to find and trace: ‘Coercion in the family context can be about not what you say but what you do not say—the long, meaningful pause.’

An analysis shared on X by law lecturer Philip Murray found an association between the level of deprivation in a constituency and how likely a Labour MP was to vote against the bill. He also shared figures showing that 2/3 of MPs from ethnic minorities voted against it. In other words, MPs from areas where people are vulnerable and at risk were more sensitive to the dangers of helping people to kill themselves.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm.

But it seems that many MPs did not appreciate what the debate was about or what they had gathered to do. Layla Moran MP said: ‘The media are asking all of us, “Are you for or against the Bill?”, but I urge hon. Members to think about the question differently. The question I will be answering today is, “Do I want to keep talking about the issues in the Bill?”’ But James Cleverly MP intervened: “she is misrepresenting what we are doing at this point. We are speaking about the specifics of this Bill: this is not a general debate or a theoretical discussion, but about the specifics of the Bill.” He was right to be impatient. Unlike the Oxford Union, the vote has consequences. Parliamentarians are not there merely to debate. As the term ‘High Court of Parliament’ suggests, when MPs (either on their own initiative or as a government) propose bills, what they are often doing is conveying a plea to redress some grievance, and their debates are to decide whether to respond by making laws to grant justice to the wronged.

The second reading of the bill on Friday was a crucial moment for them to decide whether the bill would fix an injustice or whether it would itself cause harm, because the scrutiny that the bill will undergo in the following stages is not likely to be as rigorous as with government bills. As a Private Member’s Bill, the assisted dying proposal is free to be scrutinised by a committee selected by the MP who has proposed the bill, i.e. Kim Leadbeater. When the bill reaches the stage for a final vote in the Commons at the third reading, no further amendments can be made and the time for debate is likely to be short.

It is rare but bills are sometimes defeated at the third reading. With eighteen abstentions on Friday and at least thirty-six MPs claiming they might change their minds later, there is still hope.

Each sitting of the Commons begins every day with a prayer by the Speaker’s Chaplain, who prays that MPs ‘may they never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices, keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind.’

We can only hope and pray that at their next opportunity, MP will consider this bill in light of their responsibilities as the country’s High Court, charged with protecting the most vulnerable in society from harm.