Elite athletes know better than anyone how to win. They can also show us how to lose.

[Mike B 625]

Sally Jenkins (WP)

Athletes have a level-headedness in the face of conflict. Rarely if ever do they attack an opponent viciously off the field once the contest is over, no matter how bitter the loss. Their ability to be all-in and yet to slow from an emotional run to a walk when the clock runs out is an example worth studying after this spiteful political season. Something to be proud of, even.

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Politics is not a game, but it is a competition. And sports is not an airlock. It has never been, no matter how much the audience complains when politics invades the playing field. Contentious affairs intrude, for the simple reason that ballplayers aren’t inanimate X’s and O’s. LeBron James’s very bones and skin are necessarily a matter of political power struggle because he is a Black man who wishes to better his condition. Same with Megan Rapinoe if she wants equal pay and to marry her chosen one. Sideline neutrality was not an option for them, any more than it was for Arthur Ashe, who had to leave segregated Richmond as a teenager to play tennis in the 1950s, or Martina Navratilova, who had to travel with FBI protection after she defected from Iron Curtain Czechoslovakia in 1975. “People are politics,” she has pointed out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/11/04/elite-athletes-know-better-than-anyone-how-win-they-can-also-show-us-how-lose/