Abstract
This paper engages with the classical philosophical concept of excellence (arete) as it applies to athletic achievement, arguing that contemporary sporting culture has systematically eroded the conditions under which genuine excellence is possible and recognizable. Against a background of commercialization, performance-enhancing technologies, and the reduction of sport to spectacle, we argue for a reconstructed account of athletic excellence grounded in Aristotelian virtue ethics and Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of social practices. On this account, excellence is not merely a matter of measurable performance outcomes but of the cultivation of character, the mastery of a complex skill domain, and participation in a tradition of shared goods that constitutes the internal standard of a practice.
Introduction: The Crisis of Sporting Excellence
In what sense, if any, can contemporary elite sport be understood as a domain of human excellence? The question is less straightforward than it might appear. Modern elite athletes achieve performances that would have been literally inconceivable to earlier generations. Yet this extraordinary expansion of measurable capability has occurred against a backdrop of pharmaceutical intervention, commercial distortion, institutional corruption, and a relentless reduction of sporting achievement to quantifiable metrics—metrics that are valuable precisely because they can be marketed, monetized, and detached from any richer understanding of what sport is for.
This paper argues that the philosophical concept of excellence—understood in its fullest, Aristotelian sense—has been progressively hollowed out in elite sporting culture, replaced by a thin, performance-centered conception that captures only the outer shell of what athletic excellence involves. We proceed in three stages: first, developing an account of excellence drawn from Aristotle and MacIntyre; second, identifying the structural features of contemporary sporting culture that work against the realization of this account; and third, sketching the contours of what a genuinely excellence-oriented sporting culture might look like.
Excellence in the Aristotelian Tradition
For Aristotle, arete—excellence or virtue—is not a single property but a cluster of excellences each specific to a particular domain of activity. In the domain of sport, excellence would refer to the full flowering of the capacities distinctive to the practice: not merely strength, speed, or endurance, but the cultivation of what Aristotle calls practical wisdom (phronesis) in the domain of athletic competition—the capacity to read complex situations, make sound judgments under pressure, and act in ways that manifest the characteristic goods of one's sport.
On this account, athletic excellence is inseparable from character. The excellent athlete is not merely the highest-performing athlete by some external metric; she is the athlete who has developed, through sustained practice and habituation, the distinctive virtues that her sport requires and rewards—courage, discipline, strategic intelligence, composure under pressure, and what we might call 'sporting integrity': the disposition to compete fully and honorably within the internal standards of the practice.
MacIntyre's Practices and the Internal Goods of Sport
Alasdair MacIntyre's distinction between internal and external goods provides a further conceptual resource. In After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that every coherent social practice—chess, architecture, medicine, farming—has internal goods: goods that can only be achieved by participating in the practice on its own terms, goods whose value is intelligible only against the background of the practice's history and standards of excellence. External goods, by contrast—money, status, power—can be obtained through a practice but are not constitutive of it.
The corruption of a practice occurs when external goods systematically displace internal goods as the primary motivating concern of participants. MacIntyre argues that this is precisely what has happened across many domains of contemporary life, and the argument applies with particular force to elite sport. When the primary goal of athletic participation becomes the accumulation of prize money, sponsorship income, and celebrity status—rather than the achievement of genuine athletic excellence in the internally defined sense—the practice is corrupted even if its external form is maintained.
Conclusions: Toward a Reconstructed Excellence
The picture we have drawn is a bleak one: elite sporting culture has developed in ways that systematically undermine the conditions for genuine excellence. Yet the analysis also suggests directions for reconstruction. If the problem is the displacement of internal by external goods, the response requires institutional arrangements that protect and sustain the internal goods of sporting practice: governance structures that prioritize clean competition; developmental systems that cultivate character alongside performance; educational frameworks that ground young athletes in the traditions and values of their sports; and a sporting culture that celebrates not merely the record-breaker but the practitioner of genuine excellence in the fullest sense.
None of this will be achieved easily, or quickly. The commercial and institutional forces that have reshaped elite sport are powerful and deeply entrenched. But the philosophical analysis presented here at least clarifies what is at stake: not merely the integrity of sporting records, but the possibility of a form of human excellence that, at its best, sport is uniquely positioned to realize and exhibit.
About the Author
This paper was prepared by the IOCSS Philosophy of Sport & Human Excellence Program. Correspondence may be directed to info@iocss.org.