It’s not often I pay much attention to what Donald Trump’s stooges say, and even less often that I write about the Trump administration in these pages.
Yet, here I am.
When Trump’s head of Department of Government Efficiency, Vivek Ramaswamy, recently began ranting about why Americans aren’t succeeding, I admit, I listened.
“I think we need a return to the true American system based on achievement and winning,” said Ramaswamy.
“Fewer participation trophies and more championship trophies in every area of life, from sports to the arts to music.”
He continued, but I’d got his gist and tuned-out.
Ramaswamy’s point isn’t dissimilar to one that surfaces intermittently in Britain; that, if we want to produce successful sportspeople, kids should be playing competitive sport from a young age.
Indeed, it’s not uncommon for it to be suggested that competitive sport in kids’ early years lays vital foundations for them to not only be successful athletes, but successful people.
As someone who spent two decades in competitive sport, and over a decade at the sharp end of it at international level, I’ve seen both the good and the bad sides of competitive sport.
Yes, competition develops a load of qualities within individuals, myself included; from resilience to durability to teamwork to learning to lose, there’s little doubt that sport helps develop these valuable skills within kids.
But don’t ever be fooled into thinking competitive sport is exclusively good.
Competitive sport, particularly if you’re bad at it, can be a crushing and demoralising experience that can, and this is no exaggeration, scar you for life.
Much of school sport in Scotland these days, as in America, is non-competitive.
There’s races without winners and medals for everyone who participates, regardless of their finishing position.
And so, as this non-competitive movement has become more prevalent within school sport, there’s been a perceptible push-back on it, in the same vein as Ramaswamy was talking about.
The point being, how can a country produce winners if they’re not taught how to win as kids?
On the face of it, this isn’t an outrageous leap.
As I’m sure most people who’ve played competitive sport at a high level would agree, competitiveness is a vital characteristic if you’re ever going to succeed as an athlete.
But on just sightly closer inspection, the theory that a child playing competitive sport is vital for them to become a successful elite athlete isn’t just tenuous, it’s plain wrong.
When it comes to looking for relevant case studies in sport, Norway is often the model that’s worth focussing on.
It’s a small country - the population is around 5.5 million - and its sporting success rate is disproportionately high.
In team sports, but particularly individual sports, Norway punches well above its weight in the sporting arena.
So it would be easy to assume that Norway has a highly-competitive youth system, which encourages early identification of its best talents.
Except this couldn’t be further from the reality of how Norway approaches sport and develops its athletes.
Sport, particularly for young Norwegians but really for the population as a whole, is first-and-foremost guided by the country’s vision: “Joy of Sport for All.”
This is self-explanatory, and prioritises development and enjoyment of sport over all else, especially winning and losing.
So militant is Norway when it comes to deprioritising competitive sport for young kids, there are no national championships for kids under the age of 13. There’s not even regional championships for kids under the age of 11, and there’s not published game scores for kids of this age.
This is the ‘medals-for-participation’ philosophy so hated by those who believe forcing competition upon kids, whether they like it or not, will be the making of them.
Having competition present for children from the earliest of their school years will, the supporters of this method say, toughen them all up, as well as help identify who’s got it, and who hasn’t.
Except, other than in the odd exceptional case, it’s impossible to spot which eight-year-olds are going to make it in sport and which aren't.
Yes, there will be some exceptional eight year old kids. But in the majority of cases, those eight-year-old winners amount to nothing in terms of becoming world-class athletes.
Despite this, there remains a real push to put kids into a competitive environment at an astonishingly young age.
The increasingly young age British football academies begin recruiting players nowadays is the perfect example of this.
If this theory that competitive sport for children isn’t just important but necessary to produce truly elite adult sportspeople then Norway would be nowhere in global sporting terms.
Yet, with the likes of Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Erling Haaland and Karsten Warholm, they have individuals who are not only great contemporary athletes but some of the greatest of all-time in their respective sports.
This suggests that Norway is doing something right.
Indeed, research shows that an excessive focus on results generally drives away talent.
Instead, the focal point should be on creating an environment that supports learning and development is far more useful in the longer term for both producing world-class talent, and keeping participation figures high.
We live in a world in which it’s impossible to eradicate competition entirely. But this is exactly why adding yet more competition, particularly at a young age, isn’t just useless, it’s severely detrimental.
So rather than pushing for a system that encourages excessive levels of competition in primary school-age kids in an attempt to spot the few that might ‘make it’, tthe way to really produce champions as well as a population which enjoys sport is to just let kids play, especially when they’re pre-teens, and if that means handing out 30 medals for participation then so be it.
The future champions will be in the pack working on their skills, and those who’ll never make it in sport will also be there, developing an appreciation and enjoyment of sport that will most likely endure.
And absolutely no one is losing out, either in the short-term or the longer-term, by keeping young kids away from a competitive environment.
