The School of Sport: Why does sport bring out the worst in some athletes?

Over the next five weeks, we are going to be exploring a series of profound moral dilemmas with some of Australia’s most accomplished athletes. How has their life in elite competition prepared them to wrestle with challenges so many of us have faced ourselves? Has sporting excellence succeeded in bringing out the best in them? If so, what can that teach the rest of us?

But before we examine the best, it seems only fitting that we first acknowledge the worst. In their frequent displays of superiority, and in their demand for adulation — even “worship” — elite athletes mark themselves as a class apart. More than billionaires, music stars and monarchs, it is athletes who seem to live among us like gods: bigger, faster, stronger than the rest of us.

Should we be surprised, then, when these athletes do not want to be bound by the normal laws of human behaviour? After all, the arenas they inhabit are governed by rules of their own, and their conduct in these arenas evokes older, mythic, more violent times: a time of combatants, aggressors, warriors, giants, titans. Is it any wonder that so many elite athletes — given their physical supremacy, the vast sums of money at their disposal, and the ready throng of worshippers that surround them — should be peculiarly susceptible to the arch-vices, the seven deadly sins?