Sport and Art

After having played football at a good level I have always tried to tell people that the technical aspects of playing were necessary but never sufficient, and that it was much more a question of feeling which set average players like me apart from people who were genuinely great. I’m not convinced that I ever really managed to express that idea very eloquently, in English or French. Despite currently sitting in a ski resort in the Pyrenees Mountains, I’m no expert on winter sports at any level. However I was taken with something I heard an Olympic ice skating champion say earlier in the week (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Cousins). He said that his father would always advise him that, “sport is in the training, art is in the execution”. Maybe that’s a much better way of saying what I have tried to say unsuccessfully for the last 20 years.