Sports and cults

KIM SEUNG-JUNG
The author is an archaeology professor at the University of Toronto.

The Asian Cup football tournament ended with much noise. With a loss to Jordan in the semifinals, Korea’s dream of topping Asia again after 64 years ended in frustration. Watching the Korean national team play, I was reminded of the marvelous feat of Team Korea on the international stage during the 2002 World Cup co-hosted by Korea and Japan. Since then, Korean football has improved so much that losing to Jordan doesn’t make sense. The Korean football team’s manager, Jurgen Klinsmann, has been ousted for lacking strategy.

In the United States, Olympic medalists have little benefit other than “15 minutes of fame” and tens of thousands of dollars in rewards. But stars in professional sports such as the NFL and NBA are treated as heroes. This phenomenon originated from the ancient Greek culture of sports heroes.

When it comes to ancient Greek heroes, we often think of figures such as Hercules and Achilles in myths and epic poems. The tradition of celebrating real historical figures is relatively rare in Greece. Unlike Rome, Greek politicians and war heroes were not immortalized with official statues, but athletes were exceptions. Four sports events — the Olympic Games, the Pythian Games, the Nemean Games, and the Isthmian Games — saw the participation of all city states, and those who won in the four games and brought glory to their city state were considered heroes and celebrated with statues. Winners of the Olympiad were given the privilege of being provided food for life by the government and sitting in the front row in every theater.

The statues of nude male figures that represent the ideal in ancient Greek art and the basis of all Western art history are statues of athletes. Of course, the admiration for athletics largely stemmed from the need to train ideal soldiers, but the tradition of training the body and worshipping the fit physique became the foundation of beauty in Western culture. As beauty and healthy are one, it is a topic worth contemplating with regard to the health issues of people today.