More rules do not make sports automatically safer

How do you, from a philosophical perspective, view this call for more protocols and rules? Is this the solution?

The call for more enforcement indeed echoes in the legislative proposal for a centre for integrity in sport. What I find interesting is its stated objective, with core tasks such as doping, match-fixing, and social safety. What stands out to me is that a moral assumption is being applied that is rarely made explicit: namely, that sport itself is a beautiful practice. Hooliganism, commercialisation, and racism in sport are then seen as “societal problems” whose causes lie outside sport itself, and for which sport therefore bears no responsibility. This way of thinking assumes that ethics and integrity in sport are determined by sports federations and ministries that cleanse sport of clearly identifiable abuses.
In the conclusion of my dissertation, I argue that this conception of ethics—as compliance—falls short. It leaves unaddressed the fact that not only individual behaviour, but also the policies of a federation or ministry can themselves be morally problematic, such as tying funding to medals won. Moreover, many situations, especially in elite sport, fall into a grey area: athletes often doubt whether something is off, and because they are not certain, they prefer not to report it. Yet doubt is precisely a crucial condition for ethics; hesitation creates space for multiple perspectives and for mutual attunement. Ethics in sport emerges in the contact between bodies, in a locker room or on the field of play. And bodies are always complex: in motion, sensitive, desiring, or resisting. When a coach pulls your hair or mocks you in front of a group, that is first and foremost a bodily experience, not a violation of an abstract rule.

What does an ethics ‘from below’ look like?

Crucial to understanding communication is what Michel Serres calls “noise”: noise is not merely the accidental interruption of information exchange, but its necessary condition. Noise can be understood as that which precedes all reason and order, yet is always far more extensive than both.
From Serres’ philosophy, the call for more enforcement and reporting points in sport can be seen as an attempt to filter information out of noise. The noise here is the unpredictability of bodies—surrender and resistance, or discomfort and pain—which must be managed through the channel of reporting systems and protocols. Serres himself was a rugby player and mountaineer, and in his philosophical work he frequently wrote about what physical activity does to us. Sporting experience, according to Serres, demands a bodily metamorphosis: it opens our pores and lungs, gives us self-confidence, but also lies close to loss of control and danger. Our bodies, for Serres, are not mechanical and predictable, but fundamentally turbulent and transformative. In this sense, sport can never be made entirely “safe,” but instead calls for continuous attunement between bodies and for spaces in which experiences about what is and is not acceptable can be shared.

Why should a philosopher concern himself with sport?

For Serres, interdisciplinarity is not necessarily about science alone, but also about the communication that is possible between different practices and professions. Serres was a former marine and compared the combination of natural science and the humanities to navigating the Northwest Passage, the barely passable sea route between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. This inspired me to think about the relationships between sport and philosophy: they appear to be separate domains of knowledge, but if you pay close attention, more and more routes between them become visible. For example, I noticed that elite sport often contains an implicit philosophy: great value is placed on speed and clarity, and on the sacrifice the body must make for performance. Embedded within this are images of the human being, the body, and the world that a philosopher can articulate and open up for discussion. At the same time, Serres points out that sport can also shed light on societal problems: rugby players know how to avoid aggression, cyclists how to turn the weather from enemy into friend, and gymnasts how to make a technical object their own—all in a deeply bodily, intuitive way that long precedes clear and well-defined knowledge. That is why I find it vitally important to navigate and map the various routes between sport and philosophy.

In your dissertation, you describe how the body itself ‘thinks’ and acquires knowledge. What can coaches and policymakers learn from this view to prevent athletes, as the report states, from ‘no longer feeling that they exist’ when performances decline?

Earlier I wrote the book Wij zijn ons lichaam (We Are Our Body) from the idea that human existence is bodily. Not despite the body, but thanks to the body, people can act, think, and feel. This raises the question: how can we see our body differently than as a machine controlled by the brain? From Serres I learned that we should not see the body as a unity with functions, but as a multiplicity of possibilities. Take our ankle joints alone: they allow us to stand upright like a statue, but also to run like a leopard, swim like a fin whale, and jump like a frog. The body thus takes on many forms; Serres calls them “variations.” This is also an important insight for sport, because the body of the elite athlete is often reduced to executing a single trick. Athletes such as Tom Dumoulin and Ireen Wüst later said in interviews that this approach took away their joy in sport. Sport should instead teach us to discover and practise the body’s variations. In doing so, we also learn to think in other ways and become better able to anticipate a future that is always still undetermined.