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PRE-SEASON
PETE VORDENBERG
Contributing Editor for The Master Skier
Pete Vordenberg is the head coach of the US Cross-Country Ski Team. He is a two time Olympian and NCAA Champion.
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Participation in sport has value for many reasons. The fun of participating in the activity itself is value enough. Add to this exercise, fitness and social experiences and participation in sport is quite rewarding enough to be justified. But sport has even more to offer.
Winning is a goal and an outcome. Winning as a goal is the most important part. Winning as an outcome is the ultimate measure of your ability to pursue that goal. Goals dictate action.
Planning and strategizing are meant to direct that action toward the accomplishment of the goal. It is this process of goal setting, planning and action, the pursuit of the goal, that gives winning its worth and which can give us the ultimate that sport has to offer.
Competition and the desire to win can have negative connotations. The ultimate examples of this are poor sportsmanship and the risk of poor health.
I am the head coach of the U.S. National Team. To me winning is very important. In fact there is only one thing more important to me than winning and that is how we win. This fits squarely in the realm of experiencing sport at the ultimate level.
To set a goal, in fact to participate in a sport, is to agree to abide by the rules of the game. Winning without this agreement destroys all value inherent in pursuing or accomplishing a goal. Injuring ones' health also destroys the value of sport.
Sport should add to your health not detract from it, and the health of our athletes would come before their performance if ever these two things came in conflict (which, because health is vital to performance, should never be the case).
Playing by the rules is only one aspect of sportsmanship. The rules do not always encompass all the values by which we want to conduct ourselves. There is no explicit rule about winning and losing with grace. There are no rules about having integrity. There are no rules about treating each other with respect.
Yet all of these things are paramount to winning itself and furthermore all of them can actually help a team win and enable a person to gain from sport all it has to offer.
To experience sport for all it has to offer requires a goal and rules. The rules must be both inherent in the sport itself and developed based on personal and/or team values.
One might benefit in the short term by an act that is within the rules but which violates a value held by the team or the individual herself. This compromises not only enjoyment in the sport but the accomplishment of the goal.
When an individual chooses the self over the team or winning over how one wins the accomplishment will be shallow and short lived at best. Professional cycling is now experiencing the true results of it's many false winners.
To get the most from sport your goals must be supported by your values, care for your health and strict adherence to the rules of the game.
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