We moderns love a good athlete.
They’re the physical exemplars, idols who inspire us through gritty, brilliant, muscular, and acrobatic performance.
There’s something spiritual in our admiration. Children hang athletes’ posters on bedroom walls like Byzantine icons. Society showers the greatest with riches and acclaim, indulgences redeemed on the altar of entertainment.
Small surprise then that modern athleticism takes its cues from religious history. The ancient Olympiad, that classical template for all things athletic, was itself a Grecian religious festival. The quadrennial competitions, wherein oiled-up Greeks sprinted, lifted, and rolled around with each other, were featured alongside ritual sacrifices honoring Zeus.
When you think of the ancient Olympics, you might picture well-coiffed Greeks sitting in bleached-stone stadiums, watching stoic philosopher-warriors huff around an oval circus. But I bet it was weird, more like today’s noisy pro sports leagues: mob-like spectators moaning collectively in drunken ecstasies; attendants blasting colorful pyrotechnics; animal sacrifices accompanied by vendors, hawking the same sort of colorful grotesqueries that we now purchase from concessions stands and trinket shops beneath the bleachers.
It’s a lasting legacy. Even in our secular age, great athletes are treated as if they have a touch of the divine.
Perhaps it’s that spiritual trace that explains our outrage when we learn the game’s been fixed.
Cheat at politics or in the market and you’ll be met with indifference. People will shrug, “What did you expect?” But cheat at sports and you’re a pariah. Just ask Lance Armstrong, or Ben Johnson, or Marian Jones, or any Russian athlete. For us moderns, cheating at sports is the closest thing to sacrilege.
We want to trust that what we’re watching is real. We want to believe.
And so my eye lingered on the Letsrun homepage after the London Marathon.
“Unbelievable” led the headline for Jonathan Gault’s Letsrun.com recap of the women’s race after Sifan Hassan improbably won her debut at the distance despite a less-than-ideal buildup and quad injury.
Was this a double entendre? ‘Unbelievable’ in the sense of exclamation, reacting to an unlikely event, but also ‘unbelievable’ in that prima facie this event cannot be found credible. And… was that a hint of snark in Gault’s description of Hassan’s first marathon?
“If you were to publish a guide on how to run your first marathon based on Sifan Hassan’s experience at the 2023 TCS London Marathon, it would include the following steps:
Don’t focus your training entirely on the marathon. You’ve still got a track season to run this summer.
Do your final month of training during Ramadan. That means, with very limited exceptions, no food or drink during daylight hours despite grueling morning workouts.
Develop a quad injury 10 days before the race, but forget to tape it up on the morning of the race.
Stop twice during mile 12 to stretch out said quad. Spot the leaders 28 seconds at 25k.
Rejoin the leaders and almost miss the 40k drinks station. Take a hard 90-degree turn and grab your bottle, narrowly avoiding being run over by the lead motorcycle in the process.
Finally take the lead in the final 200 meters and sprint away to win like you’re running a track race.”
To be clear, Letsrun has not explicitly or implicitly implied Hassan is using performance-enhancing drugs. Gault merely observed the performance and concluded, “Unbelievable.”
My knee-jerk reaction to Hassan’s win was skepticism. And I’m not alone. There’s a larger trend of ambivalence in the face of exemplary running performances. Too many failed tests, too many scandals.
I’ve seen no clear evidence that Hassan is using performance-enhancing drugs, beyond her earlier affiliation with Alberto Salazar, who is now banished for chemical performance enhancement at the Nike Oregon Project and alleged abusive behavior.
By all accounts, Hassan is an approachable and friendly competitor, self deprecating and easygoing. Moreover, her accolades, including the three Olympic medals she won in the Tokyo Olympics, while exemplary is not unprecedented. Emil Zátopek’s three gold medals in the 1952 Olympics comes to mind.
Is she doping? I’ve no clue.
But I’m less interested in whether Hassan or any particular athlete is doping than I am curious why we struggle to legitimate athletic performance more generally.
How did we arrive at a place where belief in athletes is so difficult? And why is trusting athletic performance a matter of belief in the first place?
Belief as a concept has a history.
So says Ethan Shagan, history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in his book, The Birth of Modern Belief. “Belief,” Shagan claims, "changes over time.” He is not referring to the content of religious belief, which of course has varied significantly over the years, but rather the very category of belief itself. What it means to believe in something has changed significantly from the year 1200 or 1600 to today.1
It’s is a Big book, the sort of intellectual history that wrangles with heady concepts and ideas. That makes it difficult to recap briefly, but I’ll try.
Shagan argues there were three phases of belief in the Christian West over the last thousand years. In the middle ages, folks navigated faith in a waffling combination of rational exercise and non-rational mystical experience. This instability was exploded by the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the reformations of the Catholic Church made belief an urgent problem.
In this second phase, religious factions—Protestants, Catholics, Anabaptists, and so on—all competed to define belief as a privileged condition, exclusive to their own theological tribe. Belief became “a project of exclusion and discipline that arrayed communities of believers against a world now understood to be saturated by unbelief.”
In the midst of all these tribes, one might think that belief became easier, that one could simply pick a religion that appealed to them. But the opposite was true. In the scrum of religious controversy, belief became exceedingly hard.
Proving one’s credulity was subject to social scrutiny and self-inspection. One could not simply claim, “I believe,” but needed to demonstrate, in multiple, difficult ways that one was not an unbeliever. Consistories and inquisitions were set up around Europe to define and defend belief. Hundreds of catechisms were created. Armies of belief communities violently clashed to advance specific formulations of belief.
Believers themselves were wracked with doubt whether they truly believed.
Accounts from the 16th and 17th centuries were laden with worries around spiritual inauthenticity and hypocrisy. Some individuals, like Nehemiah Wallington, a puritan artisan, had such intense introspection over his spiritual life that he nearly killed himself several times, including temptations to hang himself and cut his own throat. He poisoned himself twice; in one instance, swallowing ‘what must have seemed enough to kill a horse.’2
Shagan argues this pressure was too great, and belief as a category collapsed into what he calls “sovereign judgement.” In this third phase of belief, early modern Europeans came to concede that true knowledge was beyond our reach. Belief became a subjective space.
Today, when we say “I believe in… <God, human rights, that the 2020 election was stolen>”, it generally ends a conversation. While we may disagree with each other's beliefs, we can’t contest each other's belief status as belief. Belief and opinion, once opposites, are now synonyms.
So how does this all relate to the world we live in today, as we watch and participate in sports?
To me, it seems we live in spiraling, untethered loops of belief, supported by splintering forms of knowledge, increasingly of the choose-your-own-adventure variety.
Returning to Hassan, Alison Wade, writer of the Fast Women newsletter, noted her unease regarding the Dutch runner but concluded “it’s not up to me to decide who is or isn’t doping. There are agencies that do that, and the only way I can really be a fan of the sport is to trust that they’re doing a good job.” This is belief, anchored through faith in regulatory institutions.
But take an inverse case. When those same agencies determined Shelby Houlihan had cheated, the result was a bewildering cacophony of doubt and disagreement about the validity of the decision. This isn’t hypocrisy, but radical subjectivity. Belief in the truth or falsehood of a race can only be determined by one’s self. Individual belief is the decision maker when it comes to determining the authenticity of the events unfolding on the track and tarmac.
We find ourselves in a sporting world that resembles the Hobbesian state of nature, lacking a central authority to arbitrate truth. As a result, we navigate the world on our own, relying on our own subjective interpretations of footraces as the substance of our hopes and the evidence of what remains unseen.
Thanks for reading.
Events
There are a few events coming up for those in the San Francisco Bay area.
Miwok 100K Volunteering. The venerable Miwok trail race in the headlands north of San Francisco needs volunteers for race day on May 6. If you’re interested, email volunteer coordinator Magda Boulet.
Lake Merritthon. The Oakland Track Club is organizing a quirky looped marathon and marathon relay around Oakland’s Lake Merritt. Register
Weekly run. And of course there is our usual Breakfast Club run every Thursday in Oakland. More info on Strava
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing
Tweets of the week
Parting thought
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett
That’s all for this week. Thanks for subscribing.
Find me on Twitter, Strava, and now Notes.
Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgement from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).
Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: A puritan artisan in seventeenth-century London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), p. 21-25.
Wow that was the most thoughtful Substack I read this week! Nice job. Your post makes me ponder the biggest sports fan I know, my almost-22-year-old son. He's fanatic about following the Avalanche team, even though he himself doesn't play hockey; he also follows the Broncos, Rockies, and is obsessed with the PGA. But, he would have no interest in sports like running or cycling that are about crossing the finish line first. He's intrigued by teamwork and individual skills that have less to do with pure strength or speed, like chipping onto a green, which doping wouldn't help. He also follows the character storylines and business deals behind the sports. I think running will always be a less interesting spectator sport and attract fewer fans because while we runners can appreciate (or be skeptical of) elite runners' times, the sport lacks teamwork and individual acrobatics. I'm passionate about running, but a while ago stopped subscribing to Fast Women, even though it's an excellent newsletter, because I just don't care that much about top-tier competition. Not sure what that means for the sport and belief in it, but thought I'd share that point of view for what it's worth. Sure wish I could be there for the Lake Merritthon!