WHAT WORRIES ME THE MOST ABOUT THE OLYMPICS
It is hard not to love competitive sports.
They are the perfect mirror to life. The competitive nature, the needed resilience, the joy of the win, the agony of defeat, the will to go back up after a loss, the conscience to keep preparing yourself after a win.
Deep in my core, I believe sports prepare us for life. That is why I’m mad with the state of Mexican sports, and profoundly worried about what happened at this year’s Olympics.
Mexico has a lot of wealth. Don’t believe me? Look at Mexicos GDP. We sit at number 13th in the ranks. Globally, we are the 15th largest economy, with strong macroeconomic institutions and completely open to trade. We have over 130 million people, the 10th most populous country in the world, with a median age in Mexico of 29.2 years and don’t even get me started on the natural resources that exceed what most other countries have.
Now, I know is not a fair distribution of wealth; we are the 4th ranked country with total number of poor among riches economies. Our politics and politicians are a mess. And we have huge social and security issues too deep to get even started.
It is not the priority of all of our problems, but given the greatness of this country, having four total medals on what is the most important competition in the world is sad and worrisome
I don’t want to get into the reasons. They are too many, too varied and honestly not enough to allow this to happen.
Sports are the practice field of life. Sports teach us how to lose and us how to win. They teach us discipline, resilience and love. They teach us how to work as a team, and how to work as an individual. Sports allow us to practice skills and emotions to succeed in life. And by success, I don’t mean having a lot of money. It’s the wealth of emotional intelligence, the richness of discipline, the invaluable gift of curiosity to be better at your craft.
In school, you need to work as a team and as an individual. Check. In your work life, you need to compete with others to get ahead. Check. In your love life, you need resilience and faith to keep trying. Check. Tell me, what sports don’t let us experience, experiment and try?
Not doing better in the olympics is not an issue of sports, it is a mirror of what is going on in our society; it means we have fewer athletes joining teams or sports activities; it means having fewer kids that believe in themselves to achieve something great; it means having athletes ‘orphans’ of leaders to guide them; it means we stop caring about educating our future generations of leaders, by taking away the support to let them experience their leadership in control environments like sports.
Sports are born out of passion and curiosity, out of the belief of achieving something great. If we can incite this to our generation, how can we expect them to tackle the many challenges in life.
No, I don’t intend to say sports will fix all our issues. I just intend to remark how the lack of medals, reflect the lack of leadership, the lack of empathy, the lack of care; these will only have ripple effects in our society. Fewer leaders, fewer wanderers, less curious talent to seeking new challenges.
Tell me this doesn’t worry you as a leader, as a business owner, as a citizen, as a parent.
I owe most of my life to what sports thought me. I just wish that many others could have the practice field I had. Full of leaders that guided me, supported me and thought me the value of work, fun, curiosity and self improvement
