Prof. Dr. Dr. Jürgen Palm

President of TAFISA

 

Modern sport was – together with the World Exhibitions of the outgoing 19^th century – one of the first carriers of globalization. Its concept, organisation, reached the majority of countries in a thus far unknown fast process, accelerated by the Olympic Games.

Modern sport was the first culture form that had the same appearance, principles, rules, terms, fashion around the world – long before global entertainment, tourism, information technologies.

Here for the first time ever the world was conceived as one.

Half a century later a new wave in the development of modern sport began to shape up. From the second half of the 20^th century the sport development grew further into an additional and also globally extending branch. Under the name “Sport for All” programs developed which intended to give everybody access to sport independent of competitive performance: from the very young to the very old and under all economic conditions. The sport systems thus responded to the changes of contemporary life conditions. Worldwide sport grew into new dimension of participation: more than one billion participants are estimated in sport today.

This Second Wave in the globalization of sport gives it an extraordinary importance in today’s politics, health, culture, community, economy development.

The three words SPORT FOR ALL stand for an utopia. Utopia are synonyms of hopes not of realities. But they may develop a dynamic drive in themselves if they are nourished by human hope and historical factors. If a central human truth on one hand and the power of social demands on the other hand are coming together, than an utopia may have a chance of at least a partial realization: in our case the growing participation of all kind of people, under all kinds of circumstances and in all kinds of activities understood and shaped as Sport for All...from five percent of the population to twenty, to thirty to fifty and seventy, who knows. We will never reach the one hundred. And we will have to start again with every generation. But we will constantly be working on it.

There are challenges ahead of us that harden the work and at the same time improve the chances of Sport for All. I count six of them.

The first challenge of Sport for All we have to look at in the new millenium is an internationally observed change in the labour market. There is no more sufficient economically requested and provided employment for everybody. We stand at the end of thousands of years when work was dominating human life. Modern technology and economical provisioning of production and distribution does no more need the involvement of everybody beyond school age and before retirement years in employment. So we look at :Shrinking employment connected with growing unwanted free time.

The distribution of work and leisure in traditional societies was an undoubted and often unloved fact. There was more work to do in farms and factories, in offices and markets than there were the necessary hands and brains to deliver it. There was„ work for all“, there was work from childhood to late years.

Today we observe a new constellation. The shrinking of work does not automatically fulfill an old dream of humankind: to be freed from unwanted physical slavery and enter the age of selfdetermined leisure.

On the contrary. That there is not enough work for all is considered by those who are unemployed as a loss of personal status and chances. Technical and economical reasons for shrinking work can be named in developed and undseveloped societies.The reduction of work hours from 1880 to 2000 is remarkable: whereas our greatgrandfathers worked 60 hours a week our generation may have just 38 hours between Monday and Friday – and more and more are not employed at all. Let us look at the resulting forms of free time: workfree hours, obligationfree hours, unemployment, there is education time from childhood to young adulthood, there is a more and more prolonged retirement age „troisieme age“. Sociologists look at this phenomenom and give us for the near future the prediction of a 3o/ 70 society: thirty percent are working and seventy percent are not working.

But as the human being obviously cannot exist with mere unactivity, the unemploed times in life need to be spent with forms of activities which the individual considers worthwhile and socially not downgrading but status confirming.

Could and should sport not be considered as one meaningful solution?

The second challenge is the expanding lifespan – we move from a traditionally youth dominated to a senior citizen society.

The growing life expectancy in the industrial and postindustrial countries is astonishing – but as the World Health Organisation observes this applies to a remarkable extent also in the so called developing nations.

Japan, Finland, USA report life expectancies alsready close to an average eighty years. There are already 50 000 persons of a hundred years and more in the United States. We know some major reasons: it is the improved health care, it is better nutrition, it is ongoing physical activity in later years and it is involvement in social life.

The trainability of the aging body – which was denied beyond sixty when I was a student - is much higher than believed just 40 years ago. Research has proved that muscular strength and aerobic capacities can be trained into the eighties and nineties of the human lifespan and flexibility and coordination can be preserved to quite some extent by respective habits. It is based on largescale research that we can say today: 2/3 of age unwellness is avoidable by physical activity. It is no more a minority that will be able to enjoy these biologically and socially provided privileges.

The statistical relationship between young and old is shifting to the opposite: in the future the majority of the living persons will be older than forty years – and in a generation from now about every third woman or man in Sweden, Canada, Germany etc. may be 6o years or more.

This restructuring in the composition of the setup of the inhabitants will have an enormous impact on economy, social relationships, culture. The older generation will not only be more visible on the streets, they will also be important consumers, voters, attendants of leisure, culture, education programs. And they will play an important part in the social systems. Whether there is a balance in the upbringing of the retirement money by the younger generation for their old peers will be a source of limiting conflicts and allow respective lawmaking.

No doubt: as much as it is possible to minimize illness and care necessities through a long lasting physical wellness in later years as much will we minimize the financial burden on the working younger population.

To which extent and in which forms is sport requested to turn the late years of millions of people into active and more enjoyable years?

A third burden comes up now which requests sport for an adaptation of it`s role in society: this is the worldwide observed acceleration of health costs.

It was shocking to read earlier this year in the official health report of the Federal Republic of Germany how much this country is spending on health. But I have to correct my sentence, because „spending for health“ is the wrong wording. The vast majority of the costs goes not for health but goes against illness. And that is a completely different matter. The money that Germany spends against illness resulted in 550 billion German marks in the last year. An incredible sum! It means that every sixth mark of the gross national product has to be spent more or less for the repair of human bodies. Similar conditions we find in the United States and probably in general in the wealthier countries of the world. But the principle that an enormous amount of financial resources is spent on illness care is true as well for the develloping countries.

Is this our destiny or is it a grand misplanning, is it fatum or is it possible to change this?

To answer this question we must look at the kind of illnesses that dominate the scene in doctors practices. It is no more the contagious diseases like in thousands of years before – and of which we have in Aids a contemporary remnant after many of the former ones have been wiped out or have been reduced. No, these are to a remarkably high extent illnesses that result from behavior. We eat too fat and too sweet, we drink too much alcohol, we allow too much stress, we smoke. And we are sitting too much. Humans that for a hundred thousand years were hunters, gatherers, farmers, workers, walkers have turned in what the Americans call „couch potatoes“, overweight sedentarians, with high blodpressure, high cholesterol and a much too low physical activity level.

It has been estimated that at least a third of the national health costs could be avoided by some behavior changes. For my home country that would mean that we would every year be richer by 160 billion Deutschmarks. We would be able to build all the schools, parks, culture centers and employ all the necessary personell to make life more enjoyable. And what is true for this country is in principle true for all nations. Our biggest financial resource is the avoidance of habit caused illnesses. Active health can be seen as the biggest moneysaver of our time.

So lets be active, stop smoking, reduce drinking, eat less fat, less sugar and avoid stress.

But let us be realistic: fat makes meals taste better, alcohol stimulates fun, sweets can sweeten dull days, cigarettes are considered a temporary relief from stress. At least it is so as people see it. All good proposals for a healthier life remain educational intentions with little effect as long as the new lifestyle is not in itself tasty, joyful, rewarding plus healthy.

The third challenge of sport in the new millenium: to lower the burden of illness expenditure.

But sport not only as a provider oof healthy muscular and aerobic activity- as a kind of workout for a rational purpose- but sport as a provider of play, social interaction, physical selfconfirmation, adventure, instantaneous wellfeeling. A sport tailored to the choice and capacity of the individual.

In our excursion to social territories in which sport so far is not fully established but demanded we come now to the most difficult and the most human challenge: can involvement in sports prevent humans from violence?

The dark periods in history, the wars, the fights, the suppression, the occupations, overshadow the periods of peace. What is true in the grand scale of nations is true on the smaller scale of communities. What kind of a world is there around us, where schoolchildren in the morning before entering their classes have to pass through a metal detector like in airports – in order to find out whether teenagers bring guns and daggers to school.

What kind of a world is there around us, where skinheads hunt coloured foreigners through town and brutally beat or even kill them. What kind of a world is there around us in which kids in the gang of one quarter could not enter the neighboring quarter in fear of being killed. And what kind of a world is reproduced in the heads of the young when a youngster in the land of unlimited possibilities views 10 000 murders in television before she or he becomes eighteen years old.

Close to the new Millenium we stand with hopes for peace and reconciliation but with a bad record of wars and violence till the last days of December 1999: in our ears still the detonations of Kosovo and now the bombings of Chechnia, before our eyes the newspapers with the death toll of Afghanistan and Ruanda and on the tv and movie screen a flood of brutality.

Violence produced by criminal disposition may not be considered a major challenge for sport although I would not exclude that task totally as examples of sport programs in prisons had some positive results. No, the challenge of sport may be it`s role for groups of populations that are socialized into violence by the forces of ignorance and illiteracy, ethnic conflicts and wide economical disadvantages.

The fourth challenge of the new millenium: could not sport in the context of applying human rights, educational chances and economical access indeed play a role of accepting the other player, wrestler, climber, boxer, fencer, runner as a person more similar than different - and accept that in competition like in life rules and respect have to beapplied?

Sport seems to offer chances to reduce harm and violence through play. So in a model case of using empty building lots as basketball areas in Harlem, New York, the rate of violence and accidents in the respective neighborhood went considerably down. Out of the motivation to get youngsters at night away from the street in several German cities midnight baketball has been offered and the social workers there are satisfied with the socialization chance to play against each other instead of fighting each other. It was the occurence of riots in Los Angeles in 1986 that lead to the initiative of Arnold Schwarzenegger and others to create the „Innercity Games“ and attract the youngsters to sports and competitions that otherwise might be easier prey for gangs and criminality.

In a city that became infamous for drugdealing, Medellin in Colombia, an especially interesting model to deal with dangerous social networks of youngsters in gang controlled neighborhoods. Jürgen Griesbeck, a German married to a Colombian lady introduced „Futebol por la Paz“. Here street teams of eight play against each other, in which at least two girls must be integrated and in which –remarkably- the first goal must be achieved by a girl. In the 200 teams playing there are many youngsters who meet their counterperts peacefully in the game who might be shot dead if they would dare to walk into another gang`s territory.

The example of Futebol por la Paz is so convincing that the Vice President of the German National Parliament has created a foundation to bring this model to Brandenburg, an Eastern state of Germany where the crime rate is high and where there are many villages without recreation opportunities for teenagers.

We all have seen the kids, who are not older than 12 to 14 years and who in the Central African wars have been socialized into children soldiers, youngsters who were taught to kill. In their reeducation sport must play a major part if they ever learn to be part of a society in which conflicts are solved by rules and not by guns.

Let me stay for a moment longer with this theme and with a city in which the contrasts of contemporary life are representative for the contradictory situation of humankind today. It is a city of alpine beauty, of rich vegetation, historical landmarks and a remarkable development of business and industry. But it is also a city in which foreigners are warned not to walk in certain quarters and where daily robbing and stealing is happening in daylight on the streets. The word is about Bogota, Colombia`s fascinating capital. Every Sunday here the Ciclovia program of 120 km of traffic free ring streets attracts 2 million (!) walkers, bikers, runners, skaters etc. Here the course of Ciclovia goes from rich to poor quarters. Neighborhoods mix conflictfree. No incidents of crime! It is in the framework of this world class model of citizen activity with Sport for All that one can understand the decidedness of the mayor of Bogota to build in the next three years 2000 neighborhood sport facilities to improve the life quality – a factor for sure in dealing with delinquency, too.

The fifth challenge of sport in the new millenium we have to look at it as a counterfactor to the increasing role of virtual reality.

I have written this paper with my computer. With the same machine I can buy books via the internet, reserve the flight to Larnaca, inform myself on the temperature this day in Cyprus can communicate per email with my brother-in-law in Texas without going to the letterbox.The world with many of it`s offers and requests is just 20 centimeters in front of me – it takes some mouseclicks and I arrive in the library of the University of Melbourne.

For the first time in history it is possible to live nearly without physical activity. When my grandfather still needed his strength and stamina for his 40 minute walk to work, for his physical involvement as a blacksmith but also for communicating with distant living family members and for entertainment in the Saturday night dance, I could live without all of that on the electronic highways on the desk, in the tv set, the mobile phone, the cd-player.

We have the first generation where children learn to switch on a Sony or a games computer before they play hide and seek – if they play hide and seek any more at all.

So it could be possible that the activity of the human body disappears out of daily life.

The electronic industry is already developing machines which allow you to simulate the greatest sport acts yourself without moving more than the small finger. In a respective suit, with special gloves and an astronaut type helmet you may in the future pedal yourself in the Tour de France, play against Andre Agassi or his love, Steffi Graf, climb the Mount Everest or race the skis downhill. Weibel, a German philosopher of esthetics and a propagator of virtual reality, sees in these developments a chance of depart form the „prison of the human body“. This by the way is a hyper-ideology with which I cannot agree. The experience of any space-,speed-,weight- and locomotion-related act is bound to a program in the nervous system which is installed in real and not in virtual reality to be mentally and emotionally understood, evaluated and enjoyed. The youngsters who spend not only hours in front of their computer but also hours on their skateboards know that.

However the competition between acts in reality and those in imagination has grown to enormous dimensions. Information and entertainment are coming more and more out of electricity driven boxes and not out of face-t-face and body-to-body acts.

But for which price?

What are we going to loose when we win a life more and more artificial? Which are the physiological, the psychological and social consequences when the body and it`s functions are disregarded to such an extent?

And today? Many of these forms have already disappeared and many others are disregarded as they are no more seen as connected with the contemporary mainstream of lifestyles.

We observe a globalized music culture. We experience that fashion is globalized. The Hollywood dominated film industry is one of the big globalizers. Under the pressure of the major languages many idiomas are in danger to be extinct in the next few decenniums.

Modern sport itself is an example of globalisation – and the Olympic Games may be the first world wide distributed global culture: nearly a quarter century before the film industry and a century before the internet.

No doubt this process of globalisation holds enormous advantages in productivity, information, economic prices, access to former privileges etc. But we also have to watch the influence on discarding mores and creations and human diversity .

In our context we can and must complain about the effect of the disappearance of face-to-face interaction and it`s influence on social life and even on ethics. One may well learn instructions on how to operate tools and electronic machinery from a CD ROME but what is good and what is bad cannot be learned from a monitor. It needs a social context of parents or peers or teachers or teams or trainers to learn from what is right and wrong!

The sixth challenge I want to mention is the role of sport in the balance of globalization and local community life.

I believe that the human being has an existencial demand of interpersonal acts in groups which exist over a certain time. Beside family the neighborhood, hobby groups, colleagues at work, sport teams, clubs , competitors in a match etc. are necessary mediators between the individual and the abstract big society.

How to realize the existence and the effects of active communities in the daily life of today? Here I think the enormous cultural thesaurus of interpersonal acts in sports receives a new importance in the new millenium.

And also the tradional games and sports – which so impressively show their cultural wealth in the World Festivals of TAFISA – have a new chance of survival and of contributing to the quality of life in the home region and abroad.

With the chain of challenges from the disappearance of enough work, the prolongation of life, the acceleration of health costs, the economical and ethnic disparities, the growth of virtual reality and the impact of globalisation we have confronted sport with a distinctively different world than the one that sport grew up in when this century began. In the new Millenium Sport must adapt to new challenges but also to new chances.

Could sport be a medium to respond to these challenges? And if yes: in which forms?

At which price? With which consequences for doctors, educators, streetworkers, publishers,architects, urbanists, journalists, environmentalists, event managers? With which consequences for universities, companies, communities, clubs, federations,hospitals, shops, hotels, recreation centers, parks, school grounds, assembly lines, ministries etc. ? With which demands on politics, budgets, hierarchies, workplaces, laws, health services, school currucula, academic program?

I leave the questions to all of us.

The costs of such a rearrangement are considerable – both in money and in the redistribution of power. But the material and immaterial gain from such a new placement of sport could by far outweigh the necessary investments. In such a future sportoriented society the towns would have more sport- and more playgrounds, traffic free streets, a network of bicycle paths and so on. Physical education would again be a major and daily schoolprogram, the active intermission would be introduced in all factories and offices, doctors would earn their living at least half from keeping healthy and not only from medicating what is already sick. 3o minutes of daily physical activity and sport would be as normal as 3o minutes activity in the internet. Living in paradise ? No, but living in more quality of life, yes.

Such a rearrangement of sport in contemporary society can only be envisioned when we understand the new challenges and chances that sport could meet in the future.

How are the chances for the realization of this truly humanistic concept?

The 20^th century was the first saeculum of Olympic sport, the 21^st century will see the rise of Sport for All. Coubertin`s brilliant idea of creating an elite for lifting the level of the general population by acting as models for us average humans will have to be complemented by a redirected focus not only unto the elite but unto humankind as a whole.

The tasks are there. The solutions have to be found. The work may last long. But isn`t it worth every effort?