New realities of modern Olympic sport: crisis or reset values?

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L.I. Lubysheva
Russian State University of Physical Education, Sport, Youth and Tourism, Moscow, Russia

Keywords: Olympism, contradiction, values, transformation, rethinking.

Relevance. The transformations of modern sports, its deviation from the Coubertin's ideals of Olympism set scientists and practitioners thinking about its further development.

Objective of the study was to reveal differences between Pierre de Coubertin's educational concept and modern realities of the Olympic movement.

Methods of the study included dialectical method, system approach, content analysis.

Results. The main point of the Coubertin’s concept was to consistently and systematically use sports as a tool to solve educational problems as like "renewing humanity by means of education". In this case, it can be argued that, by its philosophical nature, Olympism is based on a pan-European educational paradigm, the essence of which is that humanistic education can transform social reality. This viewpoint mainstreams the morality of participation in sports competitions. Following the Pierre de Coubertin’s principles of Olympism, many scientists interpreted sports inspired by awareness-raising ideology, emphasizing the educational functions of sports activities.

In terms of the new social reality, the socio-cultural significance of sports changes radically. The main function of the Olympic sports is not education but entertainment, not participation but a specific sports result, not harmonious development but high professionalism.

Nowadays, it is not individual perfection and harmonious development that motivate the athlete to do sports, as Coubertin suggested, but hard and fast rules of commercial activity that dictate athletes and coaches how to build their sports career. Sports have become a highly paid professional activity, so an acute need arouse to improve the athletes’ performance, thus ensuring the consistency of high sports results throughout the season. How to do this under fierce competition? The answer has been found: active use of pharmaceutical substances, including banned, harmful to the athletes’ health drugs. Therefore, over and over again, we are witnessing victories more about good work of scientific laboratories, coaching staff, physicians, managers involved in pre-competitive training of national teams.

The dialectics of the modern Olympic sports is in the growing contradiction between wider demands for improvement of athletic performance, setting up records and the growing trend in achieving these results by artificial means, with the help of prohibited substances and methods. This position results in diminishing sports rivalry, decreasing interest in the Olympic movement, loss of its international authority, and total decay of the Olympic sport. The system-forming source of the Olympic sport decay is the global humanitarian crisis, which causes politicization, commercialization of sport, and a decrease in the effectiveness of management of the Olympic movement.

To adopt scientifically grounded practical measures aimed at adaptation to the new conditions of operation of the Olympic sport, radically change the system of management of the Olympic movement, it is necessary to take into account the downward trend in the significance of the universal, international and national Olympic values among the Olympic sport subjects [1].

So what is characteristic of the modern Olympic sports? Severe crisis or rethinking of the values driven by the modern realities of social development? This has not been decided yet.

Romantics hope to preserve the ideals of Olympism aimed at harmonious development of the personality. Pragmatics agree to change the ideas of Olympism based on the needs of the modern society, in other words – to restart the modern Olympic sports in order to supply the new social demand.

Recommendations. What should be the Olympic idea in the XXI century? It seems that the answer is about the formation of the Olympic attitudes in the modern society and each athlete in particular, as well as the scientific substantiation of the socio-cultural, legal, philosophical foundations of the modern Olympism.

Corresponding author: fizkult@teoriya.ru