Exactly one year ago, we came back from our skiing trip to Austria. Facing uncertainty and being extra careful, we went into voluntary quarantine for fourteen days just days before schools closed officially.
Since then, information on the disease has became much clearer but the virus politics – at least in Germany – have become deeply dystopian as we are in state of continuous lock-downs with parliaments effectively disbanded. Instead, we are being governed by a central committee of the chancellor and state leaders deciding on new measures restricting basic rights (including our rights to participate in sports) based on a blanket empowerment by the pandemic law and a permanent state of emergency (Infektionsschutzgesetz).
General participation sports (in contrast to professional sports) is still largely forbidden with the first stage of opening starting on Monday so partial (outdoor with small groups only), complicated and contingent (dependent on average incidence with ability for pull-backs) that our local club just decided to leave everything closed for now.
Here are five things that I have learnt in this pandemic as they relate to sports:
- Sports is a deeply social activity and is much more than exercise – I am a rather introverted person needing a lot of time for myself and not needing much external motivation to exercise. Nonetheless, I desperately miss my training partners, the youth group I coach and the meetings with the other coaches for making plans, reliving the great moments of the past and just having a relaxed beer. I do not even want to imagine what the kids feel that keep asking me when we can start again.
- Get real – there is no support for general participation sports but it is rather seen as a friendly but irrelevant and rather peripheral activity in our society. If I try to raise the topic with friends they laugh at it and advise not to take sports and my weird obsession too seriously
- Of course the opposite is true – Covid19 is just a special expression of how screwed we are as a society with over half of the population overweight and metabolically sick and the average kid lacking basic physical literacy. We basically wasted a full year without addressing the biggest underlying risk factor of this pandemic other than age (don’t even get me started on the other topic of industrial warehousing of our aged population being taken care of by the underpaid)
- There are real health costs to the lock-downs and two years of schoolchildren not learning how to swim (when the percentage of kids knowing how to swim was dropping anyhow) with pools still closed is probably going to be a significant but not the only cost. It is almost guaranteed that the later death of people drowning as a result will exceed the deaths from Covid in this age cohort. Drowning is the 3rd leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide and young age is the prime risk factor.
- Two weekends ago when riding my bike, I witnessed a police motorcycle pulling over and fining a group of around six road cyclists because they were riding in a group (only two people allowed to be together). If things continue like this, we might have to rediscover the counter-cultural and political dimension of sports as an expression of personal freedom and expression of opposition to the status-quo and jointly start ignoring at least the craziest of rules
Moderner Fünfkampf - mehr als ein Sport 