Victory is for wimps!

SOME will tell you that sport is all about winning. Have nothing to do with such people. Winning is not the only thing in sport. There is also, for example, losing. Losing is one of the most important things in sport, and people do it all the time, and in a thousand different ways. You can lose gloriously, dramatically, heroically, unluckily, abjectly, humiliatingly, defiantly, and haplessly.

You can lose by a street, by a distance, a canvas, a short head, a knockout, on points. You can be hammered, trounced, beaten out of sight. You can be edged out, beaten by the narrowest of margins. You can be beaten and hang up your boots/gloves/bat/racket; you can be beaten and take a lot of positives from this.

But it all adds up to the same common experience of sport: not winning. And not winning was very much on my mind as I looked back on Arsenal’s jaunt to Paris and the miracle that never quite was. I watched Arsenal for their last three rounds in the Champions League and enjoyed the ride: the wonderful demolition of Juventus, the angst-ridden squeezing out of Villarreal, and the final in Paris against Barcelona.

It seemed possible that this would be the most wonderful night in their history. Arsenal winners! Arsenal, the best team in the world! Arsenal glorious, Arsenal for ever one-up on Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal repeating the unlikely heroics of Liverpool the previous year and stealing the European Cup from beneath the noses of the great. But it didn’t quite happen.

Arsenal were down to ten men but a defiant goal up, Barcelona were beginning to believe that God had forgotten them. For a brief instant, hope flickered and seemed ready to burst into flame. Then a goal, and hope collapsed like a house of cards. Glorious no longer, Arsenal bitterly accepted their right to be called the first loser in the Champions League.

But everybody except Barcelona lost. If winning is the only way of validating the sporting experience, the Champions League has 31 non-teams. Next season, there will be 32 more clubs at the start, and 31 more losers at the end. Losing is a big thing in sport, perhaps the biggest. Winners get more space in the papers, but it is the losers that have numbers on their side.
But we repress the idea of losing. So much of the sporting experience is about anticipation: the sort of things we might do, when it all begins. And in anticipation, we are all champions, and the teams we follow and cheer for and cherish are always unbeatable. Until, of course, we are beaten.
Defeat is the sporting experience that dare not speak its name. Defeat is the thing that keeps us coming back: for when victory is certain, where is the joy? A mismatch brings no pleasure to the winner, and we call such victories hollow.

Victory is not much of a dish unless it is seasoned with the possibility of defeat. And even when teams or individuals dominate for a sustained period of time, we know that defeat will get them in the end. It always does: Pete Sampras, Michael Schumacher, West Indies, Liverpool, Manchester United, Australia. Defeat is thrilling, defeat is intoxicating, defeat is the most exciting thing in sport, apart, that is, from winning. Defeat is an important — perhaps the most important — part of the sporting life. Certainly, football fans and those who bet on horses know that.

To say that winning is the only thing in sport is to say that Tabasco is the only thing in a Bloody Mary. The Tabasco gives you the zing and the bite, but it is not the Tabasco that intoxicates, and it is not the Tabasco that keeps you coming back for more. Without defeat there is no victory; without losers, there is no winner. We celebrate the winners: and we do so while repressing the thought that every winner floats high on buoyancy on the tears of the losers. We should be for ever grateful to every loser. Without losers there is no sport.

We who follow sport are hooked on the twists and turns of the narrative: the ever-changing cast of heroes and villains, the thrilling alternations of victory and defeat. It is the unexpected victory that is always the sweetest, because it comes so close to defeat.

Arsenal were within a Thierry Henry miss of a wonderfully unlikely win. This time 12 months back, Liverpool provided the miracle that Arsenal narrowly failed to deliver. Last summer, England won the Ashes, and the joy of the victory sprang from almost 20 years of unbroken defeat by Australia, and intermittent defeat by practically everybody else. Without that history of defeat, victory would have been far less sweet. Defeat is a constituent part of sporting joy.

We are as hooked on defeat as we are on victory. Sport would not be sport without misery, without despair, without hopelessness. Victory is for wimps: it is in defeat that the true spirit of sport is to be found.