Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: How do power and violence show up through, or within, sport? That’s the question we explore in Room #924 of the Deep Talk Club, under our overarching theme of “Power & Violence.” Listen in on the examples that came up and the perspectives that emerged in dialogue…
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
A very warm good morning to you all. Today we’re talking about the power of sport, and we want to look at the question: how do power and violence show up through, or within, sport? And with that in mind, you’re all very warmly invited to join us again this morning, to dive straight into a dialogue and a reflection, sparked by whatever comes to mind for you around the title and the question itself. Just a reminder again that this room is being recorded, and we’ll publish it afterward — so anyone who joins is automatically agreeing to that. We also have three small room rules: a profile photo where you’re clearly recognizable, your first and last name, and at least one sentence in your bio. If for whatever reason you don’t want that, or you can’t speak right now, you’re warmly invited to use the chat instead, to share a thought or a question, so we can pick it up as the room goes on. And with that, I’ll mute myself for now, just to see who’d like to open up this morning’s round together with me.
Good morning, everyone. I came into the room a few minutes late, didn’t hear anything, so I figured I’d just say something. Good morning to the round. Could I ask you to repeat the topic briefly? Although, well, I can also just read it, and I assume it hasn’t changed — the power of sport. I actually got a little annoyed in this room once before, and I’ll say why: I said, whoever’s late pays the price for it in life, and I decided I wouldn’t be late again myself — the others don’t need to hear that again, they were already here. I’ll manage on my own, but thank you so much, I really appreciate the offer.
Alright, just a moment — let me quickly recap for those who joined a bit later too. So, the power of sport is today’s topic, and underneath that the question: how do power and violence show up through, or within, sport? Feel free to share your first thoughts, and then we can bring Jürgen in right after.
I do have to go slightly off-topic for a second. The first thing that came to mind when I saw “the power of sport” was actually something from the news — a very well-known sports brand in Germany just lost 1.2 billion euros in revenue because they ran a marketing campaign with a rapper, and that rapper got caught up in controversy over comments he made. As a result, this company probably won’t turn a profit this year at all — which is hard to imagine — and because of this marketing move that went completely wrong, they’re now looking at a revenue loss of 1.2 billion euros. You can’t just absorb that. And on top of that, the merchandise produced in partnership with this rapper is now essentially unsellable too. So that’s how those numbers add up. And I thought, that’s obviously a huge kind of power too, existing in this mutual dependency — not power in the sense of sport itself, playing sport, the way we might talk about it today, but a company that comes from the sports world simply having the wrong partner for its marketing. And in that case, the power actually comes from the partner. And that made me think again about how important it is for companies to have the right partner in every relationship, because marketing campaigns like that can backfire incredibly quickly, even after generating huge profits before that.
Really fascinating, thank you so much. Jürgen, a very warm good morning — what are your first thoughts on the topic?
Good morning, dear Marc, and everyone in the room. My first thoughts are a bit provocative, maybe, if I ask, in relation to today’s topic, whether we’re also going to talk about a dimension of the power of sport that wouldn’t be covered by a ChatGPT answer. Specifically, I’m thinking about the power sport has over the person who actually plays or practices it, versus the person who consumes it as a product without being athletic themselves. So besides the other angles, which are of course relevant politically and so on, or what Marc just brought up — for me the economic aspect is actually the origin, the underlying motive behind political, economic, and social movements alike is still, at its core, the individual: what sport does with us and to us, and by whom, specifically, it’s being done. That was my admittedly somewhat, in quotation marks, provocative first thought. But let’s see where the room goes from here. Thanks for listening.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. I haven’t actually asked ChatGPT about this yet this morning, so I don’t know what it would say — I’d have to test whether that point would even come up or not. I find that really fascinating, and I’m curious what the others have to say. Before we start drawing cross-connections, let’s bring Sabine in directly. A very warm good morning, dear Sabine.
A very warm good morning. When I read the topic, the first thing that came to mind was how Arab investors keep buying up English football clubs one after another. And when I lived in the US, it was the same with basketball teams — someone with enough money would just go and buy a team. And for me, that’s somewhere around where the limits of private ownership in sport are reached. And we can see what that’s doing to football in Germany too — we simply can’t compete financially anymore. The question is, do we even want to compete financially? Football is popular, everyone watches football, and I actually find that a bit of a shame for the sport itself. We’re seeing it right now with the women’s teams, who probably spend a lot of their time just doing promotional work, and who also play great football, which they’re clearly proving right now, and maybe they could finally catch up a little in terms of pay. I find that whole situation quite a shame overall. I think football, and football players, along with maybe golf and tennis, are the sports that stand out here. Other sports really have to fight hard for their funding.
Yes, thank you so much, and that’s exactly why I find this question so exciting to dig into, with the room title “The Power of Sport” — because at some point the question really does come up: is this actually still about sport at all, in quotation marks, or are there completely different interests hiding behind it? And so, just like Jürgen, I’m really curious to see which direction the room takes today. Marc, Jürgen, Sabine, would any of you like to pick up on a particular point again?
Sure, gladly. I’d like to respond to Jürgen, actually, on the question of what sport does to us. And I’d like to bring in other countries again here — I won’t name the country, for personal and strategic reasons. But there’s a country, or actually several countries, where we live, where sport also offers a way out of poverty. In the US, for example — and that’s not the country I mean — but in the US, for example, a sports scholarship can help you get a university degree. And in other countries, where children are brought into sport as early as age two or three, an entire family’s fortunes can depend on it. And I hope I’m interpreting your question correctly, dear Yasemin — I personally consider sport something really important, because it keeps us healthy. Regardless of whether I do competitive sport or not, movement is good for everyone. But if, as a child, I have to move, or have to train so intensely, because an entire family’s livelihood depends on it — because there are people so poor that sport is literally their only way to make any money at all — that’s something I hadn’t really been aware of before. Sometimes that takes away a child’s entire childhood, because everything revolves only around sport. And that’s not happening voluntarily — it happens, and I have to say this very clearly, with real brutality, the kind we really can’t imagine here. That has nothing to do with sports clubs anymore. That’s genuinely brutal. And I’m grateful that I didn’t grow up that way, and that my family never needed me to become a world-class footballer or a world-class competitive athlete.
Yes, thank you so much, and your point also brings up another aspect worth picking up — looking at sport in everyday life too, on a small scale, so to speak. Because when we think of sport, we tend to think fairly quickly of big teams, especially football, since those are the sports presented to us on television with a certain kind of power and reach. But at the same time, sport is also something that accompanies us in everyday life — we do sport ourselves to stay fit. And there’s a power of sport here too, when it comes to things like mental strength, for example. So maybe we can think in that direction too — that might be another door we can open here.
Thank you, dear Yasemin, I wanted to respond directly to what Marc said. And, as always, my favorite topic — terminology. Marc, I think what you described is correctly positioned in relation to today’s room topic, because we’re really talking about the power of sport here. And I’m a bit obsessive, almost gender-studies-like, about terminology on this topic — for myself personally, I always ask: are we talking about power, or are we talking about domination? And especially in sport, from my own experience, I think that distinction really matters, precisely because of what Marc just described. Something is domination, for me, when it acts on me against my will — when I don’t have the freedom to object, and I have to adopt a behavior that I don’t actually, willingly, understand or accept. And that, for me, is exactly the topic Marc raised. I think, on this subject, we should agree on something: if we define sport’s sphere of influence — whether positive or negative, on individuals or on communities — this capacity to influence, in both the positive and the negative sense, as the defining factor of power, then fine, I’ll go along with that. That works for me. But if we don’t do that, or if we arrive at a distinction instead, then I’d emphasize again that sport, as a factor of power, acts against the will of a specific group or individual. And I have examples for both of these aspects from my own personal sporting experience, and sorry if I’m being blunt here, which I don’t usually do, but I know what I’m talking about, which is why I’m intervening so strongly on the terminology here. Are we talking about power, or are we talking about some other form of shaping or acting upon an individual or a group? Thanks for listening.
I’d actually like to broaden this, because we can open up different doors here, and that lets us open up different perspectives too. Let me bring in another example: if we think back, for instance, to a room we did a while back on the power of language, we didn’t just look at, in quotation marks, what it’s like when language is used against my will in some way — we also looked at the power of language in terms of, for example, the sense of self-efficacy it can create. And that puts us in a different territory altogether — namely, how can I use and apply that for myself? So I think it would be great if we could open up these different perspectives here too. Jürgen, does that make sense to you?
That makes complete sense to me, and for me that also closes the loop back to this question of looking at the individual themselves — both the one who practices the sport, and the one who consumes it as a spectator. Let me explain briefly why I’m drawing this close connection: today, the underlying motivation for very many young people, and I say this completely without judgment, who are in competitive sport from an early age, is already oriented toward pecuniary profit. And that’s something which, whether positively or negatively, has clearly shifted over the timeframe I can look back on — and that’s also my bridge to the consumer, because the athlete, and especially the competitive athlete, is increasingly, in terms of self-perception too, becoming a producer of very specific product performances, up to and including, I’ll say, substitute gratifications for those who’d like to be that way themselves but unfortunately can’t, or don’t want to — and expects to be compensated for that too. So thank you, Yasemin, for connecting this to that huge underlying topic.
Yes, thank you so much. And while you were talking, a memory came back to me — I played basketball very intensively many years ago, and it really was a challenge back then just to find a place to play at all. Outdoors, there were hardly any options where you could even find a hoop to play on. So we were essentially forced, in quotation marks, to sign up with a club. But the club’s actual intention was to train professional players, and accordingly they trained very intensively, including various games that took place on weekends — not for the sake of fun, in quotation marks, but really about performance. And that bothered my friends and me a lot, because we had absolutely no ambitions in the direction of “I want to become a basketball player” or anything like that — we just enjoyed the sport and wanted to play it privately, purely for fun. That memory just came back to me, and I find it really fascinating in this context.
I’d like to briefly touch on the audience, or the listeners — I won’t say a name, since this is being recorded and that might not be comfortable for them. Oh, I see the doctor is still here — thank you so much for the thumbs-down gesture, by the way, and I’d like to stress again how difficult it is when you can’t really get into a dialogue, which is why I’d love it if more people came up on stage. I fully support every kind of sport, and I can see you’re a very athletic person — I think that’s great. I’d give my kids every kind of support. If my son said, Dad, I want to become a competitive athlete, I’d drive him however many kilometers it takes to make that happen. What I meant was a country where, as a child, you don’t have that as a voluntary choice — instead, the pressure isn’t really about sport, but about survival, and it’s so intense that children are put through something like military-style drills, which stops being fun at all. That’s not sport for enjoyment anymore, that’s coercion. And an entire family’s wellbeing rests on the shoulders of a three- or four-year-old child, who has no way to defend themselves against that. That’s what I wanted to make clear. Other than that, I fully support anyone doing sport — if my earlier comment came across as anti-sport, that’s not the case at all, I think sport is really important. And one more thing I wanted to mention: this country I won’t name for personal reasons, I once got to travel there, shortly before an Olympics. And sport, of course, also leads to championships, which is a wonderful thing — but what really shocked me is that sport, and championships, and world championships, can also lead to entire neighborhoods disappearing. Neighborhoods where people actually live. The reasoning is that the country wants to present itself well to the world, and if a neighborhood doesn’t look good on camera, doesn’t fit the image the country wants to project internationally, then that neighborhood simply gets removed — nobody lives there anymore. Nobody talks about it, the bulldozers just come through, so everything looks nice for the World Cup. That, too, is the power of sport for me — or really, at the end of the day, the power of money, and the power of image, of vanity, and so on.
Yes, very fascinating, thank you so much. Sabine?
We still can’t hear you, Sabine, you’re on mute.
Sorry, I had to find my phone again first. I actually wanted to pick up a bit on what Marc said. Of course, it’s dramatic when it happens the way you described. But is it really that different from what happens more commonly? I see it in tennis — four-year-olds are already out on the tennis court. They can’t even hold the racket properly yet, so people wait a little, but they’re so motivated that of course they want to become players too, and they train every single day. Maybe some of them will actually make it. But I’ve also seen a lot of kids wreck themselves through sport, because training that intensely at a young age is actually harmful for the joints and bones. But once you’re inside that, let’s call it, funnel, it’s almost impossible to step back out of it. I watched a promotion match this past weekend, from the regional league up into the Baden league — no wait, the other way around, into the Baden league — and next year there’s a 13-year-old who’s going to be playing in the women’s team there. You really have to stop and think about that. That can’t be healthy anymore. They get a doctor’s note saying they’re fit to play, but that doesn’t make it okay. I also witnessed this myself — we used to live not far from the Mannheim Eagles, and their scouts were already recruiting kids straight out of elementary school, trying to get every one of them into running training. I personally witnessed one boy who went to training four times a week, and then he was supposed to…
We’ve lost you again, Sabine.
So, training four times a week is the last thing we heard. Let’s see if the connection comes back.
While we wait and see if the connection comes back, let me pick up on this briefly. This is ultimately independent of sport as such — we’ve opened up extremism as a topic in one of our rooms before too, and kept noticing, in one direction or the other, regardless of the topic at hand, that it applies here just the same. And it’s no different with sport: whenever something becomes too extreme, it comes with a price, in quotation marks, that has to be paid, and that price can be shaped by different factors — whether that’s physical, in terms of health, whether health eventually suffers as a result, which we do have findings on — and at the same time there are other aspects worth bringing in too. There are plenty of athletes who are very focused on their sport, which makes sense if you’re trying to reach a goal or you have a vision connected to it. But then, in quotation marks, the world can collapse the moment a sports injury or something similar happens, and suddenly you have to come to terms with the fact that you can no longer practice that sport professionally. And we actually had Markus Czerner with us as an author before, at our author’s breakfast — he had wanted to become a professional athlete himself and trained very intensively, and then, as far as I remember, an injury meant he could no longer pursue that sport professionally, and he had to completely reshape his entire life, including, of course, first coming to terms with that whole shift in mindset. Sabine, are you back with us? We lost you — we only caught “four times a week training,” and then you were gone.
Doesn’t seem to be working right now. Marc, go ahead.
I have to smile at myself here — I looked again at the room title, “The Power of Sport,” and I noticed that money and training methods immediately came to my mind, even though none of that is actually in the title — it just says “the power of sport.” And that made me realize again how quickly our brains tend to search for what’s bad, where we might find something we don’t like. And with the room title — I remember Jürgen’s opening remarks — it could just as easily have developed in a completely different direction: “the power of sport,” hey, the power of sport! And I also see that Ria was in the room with us, who works in education. The power of sport — what does that mean if we talk, say, about overweight children, or about diabetes, which is a really current topic in Germany right now? Then the title “the power of sport” takes on a completely different meaning. What could sport actually do for us? Less depression, lower medical costs, and so on. And I just noticed that in myself — the thought only occurs to me now. My mind went straight to the power of sport in terms of shady officials, the awarding of the football World Cup — how do you even get a World Cup, who do you have to be nice to, where does the money get paid? I immediately thought of conspiracy and money, and not at all about the obvious thing, which, here in Germany, would be: how do we motivate children, tell them, hey, if you do sport, it does something for you, it gives you power over your own body, and so on. That would be a completely different room, a completely different conversation altogether.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much, and that really shows how our brains are wired here — you remember, the first question is always, to what extent does this threaten me? And so, even when it’s not personal, we tend to look, to some extent, first at what isn’t going well — where are the risks, or the dangers? And only the second question is the benefit, in quotation marks. And then our thinking moves back in the other direction again. So, really fascinating.
Thank you, dear Yasemin — I really want to give Marc a hug right now for his words. Bear with me, dear Marc, if I go back to my own personal background again. I owe practically everything in my life, somewhat exaggerated, to my attitude, my development, my sense of self, my self-determination, and what I openly communicate — a certain pride in having experienced this life the way I have so far, with one current exception. And here’s the second point, in relation to Sabine: it’s in this balance, which I attribute to myself, between body and mind. And, dear Sabine, what you described, regarding negative — specifically negative — instrumentalization of young people, that absolutely exists, I’ve seen it too, and I’ve partly experienced it myself. But we’re back at one of our meta-level topics here: mens sana in corpore sano, sorry — a sound mind in a sound body. Both, in complement to each other, require a responsible position from whoever is doing the training. In sport, that’s the coaches and the officials; in training the mind, it starts with our parents, through socialization, teachers, and many others connected to it. But the essential thing is that there’s responsible action taken in the interest of the positive benefit of the person being trained. And that applies, for me, equally to mental capacity, I’ll repeat myself, and to the physical domain, to sport. We’re really on the same level in both areas, and I see both as essentially interdependent — I’m a firm believer in that saying — in shaping a personality and finding one’s way toward self-determination. For me, it’s really important to always keep that connection in view.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much, Marc. Sabine, did you want to follow up here too?
Yes, very quickly, on that same train of thought — besides Yasemin, I want to remind you to definitely listen to the podcast episode with Marc Gasser as a guest, “The Power of the Dragon.” This Marc Gasser has practiced several martial arts, and it was really about highlighting the positive side of sport — that through sport, or through the Shaolin method, and through Asian martial arts in general, you gain courage and inner strength. That hadn’t come to mind before, but now that my thoughts have shifted in this direction, things like that come back to me again.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. And it’s really interesting, if you reflect and observe a little further, what the classic image is that we think of when it comes to sport, and how we’re steered, and to some extent manipulated, in our thinking from the outside — because when we talk about sport, for example, we tend to think fairly quickly and classically of football or something similar, and we leave out many other areas at first, only coming around to look more closely at them on the second or third thought, so to speak. So that’s really fascinating in this context too. Sabine, I see your microphone is working again.
Yes, I don’t even know how much of that you all heard. My phone battery died, and I was so absorbed in your conversation that I forgot to plug it back in.
We heard you up until “four times a week,” roughly.
Right. Okay, I’d like to pick up on Jürgen again briefly — I fully agree with you. I played handball myself, up to the second Bundesliga level, but I started relatively late, and back then that was still possible.
Today you wouldn’t stand a chance doing that. If you start that late now, you can basically write yourself off from the start.
What I also wanted to say — if a 13-year-old is already playing tennis in the women’s team, and training four or five times a week, that’s surely not going to be sustainable for her bones long-term. That means, by the time she’s 25 or 30, she’ll probably end up like Steffi Graf, who’s also fairly physically worn out, from what I’ve heard — I have no personal connection to her, that’s just what I’ve heard. And so I have to ask, is that actually a good thing we’re doing for these kids in the end? Can the kids even grasp the consequences at that age? Because of course the kids want to reach the very top, and the kids who are successful always want to go one step further, even if it comes at the cost of their health. I saw it with my own daughter — she played football, and she doesn’t play football at all anymore now, for health reasons. She wasn’t even training four times a week, only three, and in the end that was still too much for her. She’s fine athletically today, but she has this one lingering issue — her knee is pretty banged up. I don’t know if we actually did her a favor there. We never pushed her into football, that was entirely her own choice, but maybe we should have applied the brakes a little. And I wanted to say something about Marc, about that Marc Gasser — I’m actually reading his book right now, what a coincidence. He essentially transforms sport into your own personal attitude, and that connects a bit to what Jürgen said earlier too — he took a lot away from sport, and I can say the same for myself. That ambition and drive, you develop that through sport, and when you carry all of that over into your job, you take it with you — you don’t just drop it at the door and say, oh, sport’s over now, time to throw myself into something else. So I’m completely with you all on that. It really is a wonderful thing.
Yes, thank you so much, and while we couldn’t hear you for a bit there, I picked up on these terms again — with every topic we’ve looked at, anything taken to an extreme eventually develops a form that’s no longer healthy, whether that’s sport, meant physically here, or seen in some other, more general context. And of course we can transfer that to plenty of other areas too. Even if we open up something like performance in some form, school performance for example — if I were to make a comparison here, how many parents put pressure on their children in terms of achievement from a relatively early age. And sport is a form of competitive achievement too, when practiced very intensively — so we have this performance component playing a role here as well, meaning children barely have any free time, or get in trouble for bringing home bad grades, and bad grades don’t even mean failing grades anymore, sometimes even a B is already considered disappointing. Children as young as kindergarten age already get taught all sorts of things in advance by their parents, just so they’ll keep up well in school later on, and so on. So I think we can open these doors in many different directions — this isn’t just limited to the context of sport. And whenever something becomes extreme, regardless of the topic we’re talking about, it brings certain downsides with it. Jürgen, you wanted to follow up, and then Marc.
Thank you, dear Yasemin. On the subject of extremes, that really opens up a huge door for me. And I think we could have a very fruitful, opposing discourse there, one I’d genuinely consider fruitful, because, as you say, both perspectives — the positive and the negative view of what one first has to define as extremism, especially in sport — could lead to a really fruitful outcome. But I actually wanted to respond directly to your last question, if I understood it correctly: in which direction are we being manipulated in connection with sport? Assuming I remember and I’m reproducing that correctly. And here, just like with mens sana in corpore sano, I’d like to point to what seems to me an obvious duality — between sport and education, or the education system, specifically the school system. And I see the same pattern in both: that both remain, essentially, still driven by economic, macroeconomic, or partly economic considerations. And the transmitter for sport, in particular, is the steering medium — namely, as we’ve discussed before, the media, which ensure that, for example, right now the broadcast coverage of the women’s football World Cup dominates every channel, while at the same time the world championships in Sweden get, as far as I can recall from the past few days, somewhere between half an hour and forty-five minutes of coverage on public broadcasting. So, in my view, there’s an increasingly inherent economic entanglement at play in sport especially, which is also reflected, not least, in football transfer fees, which have by now reached a dimension that, one really has to say today, is beyond anything reasonable. And in the same way, to close this thought, sport serves as a bridge to the topic of education and the school system — it forms a very concrete stance in terms of implementing or realizing economic interests, just as our curriculum, for decades, almost centuries, has been oriented toward training people with the goal of equipping the economy with appropriately educated citizens. For me, that’s clearly a parallel. Thank you.
Thank you so much. Marc, you wanted to follow up too.
Yes, I hope I’m not derailing everyone’s train of thought here. As an entrepreneur, I just imagined what the power of sport says about someone’s character. And if someone introduced themselves to me and said they’d practiced Asian martial arts, or played in the first Bundesliga — regardless of the specific sport — I’d actually set their résumé aside first, because sport can tell me so much more about a person than that ever could. Because what you’ve all already mentioned — when I do sport, I go past my pain threshold, I need perseverance, an extreme amount of willpower, and belief in myself. And none of that shows up in a résumé at all. In that case, I’d learn far more about someone from their sporting background than from any résumé.
Yes, I find that point really lovely. We actually did a room a while back — I think we even had four of us moderating together with the others — about hobbies, and what strengths we’d each developed out of them. And this is heading in a similar direction, building a bridge to that room I’m remembering now. It was really fascinating, if you all remember, everything we developed out of the hobbies we’d pursued in the past, in our youth, in our childhood — all the qualities and skills that grew out of those hobbies, which also helped build strengths that stayed with us throughout our whole lives. I find that aspect especially lovely. Thank you, dear Marc. And with that, I’d like to bring Layla into the round. A very warm good morning — what are your thoughts on the topic, Layla?
A very warm good morning. I found what you just said really interesting, Sabine, because it reminded me a little of something. I’ve actually worked with competitive athletes at school too — I have students who do martial arts, which is quite interesting. And yes, it’s a real balancing act, you’re completely right about that — where exactly does it start becoming negative? What I have noticed, though, is that the topic of movement — and I’m not sure if movement and sport, from a definitional standpoint, we’d probably have to ask Jürgen about that, are actually different things — still needs its own space, because, as you’ve all said, the children and teenagers I’ve observed who did sport had a positive relationship with it. They had a higher tolerance for frustration — and these are really just personal observations of mine. And what I’ve also noticed is that movement in schools — and here I really can speak from experience, I know a lot of mothers with children of elementary school age, who are told to sit still — I always try to bring in this idea of the “school in motion,” and I’ve had really positive experiences with that, and I think it fosters strengths too. And on the subject of football, I wanted to say — I have girls who do martial arts, who play football, and I have boys who do the same. The boys always talk about it very, I don’t know, enthusiastically, they really get excited about it, and the girls tend to be more reserved, and when I ask them about it afterward, they sometimes tell me, well, I don’t want to get teased. And maybe that’s interesting too — what images we hold beforehand about who can do something and who can’t, and what images we carry in our heads, like Marc mentioned with martial arts too — we automatically have images in our heads there as well. That’s just the thought I wanted to add.
Thank you so much. And here again we have this same aspect — what gets steered, for example, through the media? And here we also have another factor at play, for example through the film industry, in quotation marks — certain images get created there too, similar to other areas. You might remember, at certain times, when a movie about dogs became really popular — I think it was the Dalmatians — suddenly a lot of parents gave their kids Dalmatian puppies as gifts, because the kids thought Dalmatians were just so cute. And it’s similar here, in this context, with martial arts — there have been various films that were huge box-office hits in the past, which pushed martial arts more into the spotlight, and so on. So you can see there are definitely trends at play here too, in quotation marks. And with that, I’d like to bring Ria in first, and then we can draw more cross-connections afterward. Although I only heard that someone had raised their hand at some point, without seeing who it was.
Okay, good to know. That means we’ll bring Sabine in, and then, sorry, Ria, and then Sabine can follow up afterward.
Okay, I wasn’t quite sure if the connection was stable. A very warm good morning to you all — a really interesting, wide-ranging topic, and I’d like to broaden it a bit further. Layla already touched on this direction a little. Some time ago — it must be two, or actually more like five years now — I heard an interesting phrase: sitting is the new smoking. And movement and sport have become immensely important for harmonizing body, mind, and soul in our modern times. And in connection with a really interesting book, “After Cancer Care,” which is about aftercare for cancer patients — most cancer patients, after roughly the first six to nine months, are relatively well connected to doctors, because they’re going through chemotherapy or radiation, and are still part of an aftercare program. But after about a year and a half, that connection tends to slip away. And there were scientific studies showing that, above all, those who kept exercising throughout got through chemotherapy noticeably better, and after chemotherapy found their way back into everyday life noticeably better too, and for longer — I’d say they were able to continue living with a really good quality of life. I’m not entirely sure whether it even had a life-prolonging effect. But alongside healthy nutrition, and alongside the medications you’re supposed to take, it’s really, really important that, especially in that situation, moderate movement and exercise play a very significant role. And that, for me, is also a kind of power — if sport has that kind of power over us, over what we experience, the power to help us stay healthy or become healthy again, that’s something worth reflecting on too. Although, of course, I’m using the term power here in a different sense than you, dear Jürgen. Thank you.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. Sabine, you wanted to follow up, and then the others are welcome to jump back in too — and I’d also like to bring in a contribution from the chat after Sabine.
Really interesting, Ria. This must be over ten years ago now — a professor from Heidelberg University gave a talk for us once and said exactly that, and he added a positive-attitude angle on top of it too. So not just if you’ve already had cancer, but simply that you have a stronger body if you exercise regularly, combined with a very positive mindset. So I can definitely relate to what you’re saying. The other thing I wanted to mention — what was it again? Ah right, on the subject of sport — I think it was Layla, or was it Marc, who said that if someone’s played sport, they’d set that person’s résumé aside. It was Marc, actually. I’d like to push back on that a little here, though. My daughter played hockey before she played football, and she was on a bit of an elite team, with two girls who were very good — certainly on par with each other — and they trained and trained and trained, and started acting like they were in charge. My daughter rejected that, and wanted to quit hockey, for exactly that reason. So I went to talk to the coach afterward and told him I just wanted to briefly explain why my daughter was quitting — it wasn’t that his training wasn’t good, it was that there was bullying going on on the side that he had no idea about at all. So I just wanted to point out that just because someone does sport doesn’t mean anything on its own — there can be all sorts of side dynamics going on out there on the field. I don’t think that’s any different from bullying at school, really, and there are plenty of people who don’t put athletic ability above everything else, and there needs to be room for another path too. I just wanted to mention that, because I experienced it firsthand with my own daughter.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. Let me pick up on the aspect of definitions here for a moment. The Oxford dictionary defines sport, in square brackets, as physical activity carried out according to certain rules, in competition, for enjoyment of movement and play, aimed at physical fitness — playing sport, for example. And then there’s a second meaning, sport as an academic subject, or school subject, or similar. So here too, you can clearly think in different directions. That’s one thing I wanted to add as an impulse. We also had a contribution in the chat that I’d like to bring in, given the time — at least to make sure we’ve covered it and give you all the chance to think in this direction too: what’s the impact of sporting events, like the football World Cup, on the development of countries such as Spain in 1982, South Africa in 2010, and Qatar in 2022? And we can pick that up too — Marc already touched on something related earlier, although these aren’t necessarily only negative developments, there can certainly be positive developments we want to bring in here too. And to pick up on what Sabine just said, on that positive note that got added when we talked about sport in a health context — I’d also like to draw a connection to a room we did before, where I brought in some findings from brain research too. Namely, that in this context it’s not simply positive thinking, but something very specifically steered — mental training, essentially. And if you take a fairly broad definition of sport, it might be an interesting thought to include this kind of mental training under that umbrella too. Because we now have findings from brain research showing that when we actually, even without training somewhere physically with an athletic activity, but instead really feel our way into it and imagine it — because our brain can’t distinguish between what lies in the past, what lies in the future, and so on — and actually carry out a kind of training under certain conditions, there are certain frameworks that have to be respected there — but it’s genuinely possible that muscles actually get trained purely through “mental training,” simply by imagining that you’re actually doing that training right now, and experiencing it as if you were really out on the field training. And interestingly, the muscle gains achieved that way don’t deviate all that much from what you’d actually build up on the field. There was an actual control group used to compare this — they trained a finger, and with real training it was 20 percent, and with mental training it was still 16 percent. So that’s really fascinating too, worth bringing in here. Now, I see Layla had raised her hand. Marc, and then I’d like to give Jürgen and Ria the chance too, before we move into the closing round.
That was a lot of points to cover. On Ria’s point — I’d actually have to go dig up the show again, I’ll send it to you if I find it, it’s specifically about medicine as sport. There’s also a complaint in it that health insurers only partially cover this, or don’t cover it long-term, which I find a real shame. I don’t know if that’s due to a lack of studies, or if the focus just isn’t put there — and there we’re back at the power of the pharmaceutical industry, I’m not entirely sure. But I do know it has a positive effect, and that inflammation markers can also go down if you do it in moderation. And on that topic of moderation, I wanted to go to Sabine — that reminded me of when my teacher once said, when I wanted to play football, “I’m not going to play football with the silly geese.” And I remember thinking, wow, that’s harsh, and I lost all motivation. And I think that has a lot to do with motivation as a topic — it’s just one individual case, but it’s meant to stand in for the fact that these images we carry in our heads really matter. And, well, you have to make sure you actually enjoy moving, and don’t go in with preconceived opinions like, okay, this person can do it, this person can’t, or, that’s just how it has to be, that’s how I’ve always seen it — and there we’re back at your films again. And Yasemin, what you said, I find really exciting too, because I know sports scientists, and what I’ve noticed, even in people who do a lot of sport, is that they genuinely train their brains too — meaning they visualize it. Apparently that’s also common in elite competitive sport, that you imagine it, and that this actually improves performance, because those movement sequences eventually become automated. On the training aspect, what you mentioned, I find very verifiable, and I agree with you there. And I think it’s really important to hold a positive image of it. And to close, I wanted to add — I once learned the phrase “hand, head, and heart,” sorry, and I think that’s really important. And I tend to agree with moving away from all this sitting, Ria, you put it exactly right — sitting really is the new smoking. And that we need to bring movement back into schools, because whenever I do an exercise like that with students, I notice how they relax. And with a running dictation exercise, for instance, or other movement-based exercises, you get a completely different kind of motivation, and learning happens there too — learning doesn’t only happen while sitting still, even if you can imagine it that way too. Thanks for listening.
Yes, thank you so much. Marc? I’d just like to quickly replace the word “sport” with “movement” — that’s important to me. The word “sport” doesn’t create positive images in my mind at all. I associate it with having to put on a tracksuit, put on shoes, go to my club, having fixed appointments — all of that comes with effort, and I have no desire for that. But movement, I find that extremely important. And what Ria said, I’d like to underline that again — I’m actually on the German Cancer Society’s website right now, and the very first headline says, “Sport and exercise are as important as medication.” And it really is true, studies show that movement — not sport specifically, just pure movement — lowers the risk of esophageal cancer by about 21 percent, imagine that, 21 percent, and lowers colorectal cancer risk by about 10 percent, for example. And that’s why I make sure to keep moving. I’ve stopped using the word sport altogether now, and I just say, movement is fun for me. And I no longer define that for myself as sport, but as movement. And I try to do that every single day.
Yes, thank you so much. Ria, you wanted to follow up too, and I also saw Jürgen had raised his hand.
Actually I hadn’t raised my hand, I’d just sent a little heart, because what Sabine said really matters — that third aspect is unbelievably important. And it holds a great deal of power in sport too, namely the inner attitude toward the whole thing. So many people keep wanting to start doing sport again, those wonderful New Year’s resolutions, but then they don’t follow through, because, as Marc put it so nicely, they’d actually have to put their shoes on. And for me, that phase of overcoming that resistance is already, in itself, a kind of power you gain over yourself. And sport, or rather movement — I fully agree with Marc there, that the term really should be broadened, in terms of what actually matters, though maybe not in connection with today’s specific heading. Because sport, especially in the societal sphere, holds a great deal of power, and a great deal of power gets exercised through sport. That’s one side of it. But from the personal perspective, you gain power over your own body, and also over your own thoughts and your intuitions — or maybe “intuitions” is the wrong word — by engaging with it and genuinely overcoming your own inner resistance. And that way, you also stay healthy longer, or maintain a better quality of life for longer. Thank you.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much, Jürgen.
Thank you, sorry, dear Yasemin, if I rewind the conversation a little here, but I’d like to connect back to what was said earlier, which was also my opening statement — looking at what sport does to, or makes of, the person who practices it, power in the truest sense of the word. That’s one connecting point I still wanted to address, and the second is your definition regarding sport, which I found, and still find, really important to distinguish. There are, for me, two basic forms of sport that significantly affect both the physical training of the athlete and the psychological training. And here too, let me say, I’m speaking from experience — namely the distinction of the individual athlete, the solo competitor. In my case, in its most extreme form, I swam marathon distances, where you spend hours completely alone with yourself, and you train yourself to pay attention to nothing but yourself. On the other hand, I played water polo for more than a decade and a half, as part of a team. And there, of course, the physical prerequisites — being able to stay afloat — were the same as for a long-distance swimmer. But it required a completely different kind of discipline, and completely different individual skills — namely integrating into a community, and recognizing collaborative processes within a team, in a way that’s not required of a solo competitor at all. And making that distinction, when assessing whether this sport is beneficial for a young person, and which positive and negative effects it brings with it — physically and psychologically — essentially depends, I’d say today, on a balance between being a solo competitor on one side, and being an athlete who necessarily sees themselves as embedded in, and dependent on, a community on the other. These two forms shape different character traits, and different physical skills and abilities. That’s what I wanted to add at the end, on this enormously large topic. Thank you.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much, and from my perspective those are two more aspects worth looking at with some nuance, alongside the example I brought in earlier from brain research. I’m completely with you on what you said, although I think there’s a distinction to be made there too — or maybe it’s really a third aspect — with the example I gave, because that wasn’t about mental training in the sense of it having a mental effect on your mind during the training itself. The example you just brought up with swimming has a different kind of mental effect than if I do dry-land training, so to speak, and simply build muscle. In that case, I’m not doing it to strengthen myself mentally, so to speak, but still to build muscle, for example in bad weather or something similar. Jürgen, go ahead.
Well, here I’ll take a clear position from my own past. I was very actively involved early on, when the first attempts at this kind of mental training — I can only speak about swimming here — were being carried out. And my experience from that is that, in terms of physical capacity, it made absolutely no difference for me at all. I was involved in a research context at the time, at the University of Mainz, where I also trained. And back then, we were essentially adopting findings, especially from the Soviet Union and from East Germany at the time, and trying to apply them. And I’ll stay consciously focused on my own experience here — I won’t say how it worked for others — but what I can say without a doubt, dear Yasemin, and everyone else, is that simply learning the method of concentrating and focusing, and in my case specifically shutting out all other influences that might affect me negatively, was a huge success. But in terms of the physical side, I have to say it had no effect at all. That’s my experience from that particular context.
Yes, thank you so much. On that note, I can say I’ve mentioned in a room before that I consciously use trance exercises while swimming, for example, which really helps me switch off completely too — and that’s this mental component. I’m not entirely sure, Jürgen, whether you applied that outside of swimming too, what I just described, or whether it was only during the sport itself — that would be a different component altogether, which is why I’m bringing it up again.
Well, that’s exactly what I said at the beginning, when I focused on myself and asked what sport gave me — I said, pretty much everything. It was a really essential aspect for me, for example, during my professional training, my professional work, while at the same time pushing through a degree program and still keeping my career path in view, and so on — learning that method through the experience I gained in sport. This shutting-out, this focusing, this strict focus on a goal or a vision, and carrying it through consistently, building up a certain resilience against things I can’t influence but that still affect me negatively — I attribute all of that to my sporting past. That’s where I learned it, and in fact in both forms — both as a solo competitor, and as someone who still has to function within a community at the same time. So the example for me was pushing through my degree — on one side, I was focused on graduating, and on the other, I still had to function as an employee within a company at the same time. That might be one example of it.
Yes, wonderful, thank you so much. And since you just brought up the term resilience, I’d like to mention again that the Knowledge Base on my website, under the keyword stress and stress management, also covers the BASIC-Ph concept, likewise derived from brain research. That might be really interesting to look at in this context too, because that’s exactly where we get to this holistic aspect — behavior, movement, then relaxation, and nutrition. And all these components we’ve touched on today are, essentially, part of that too. So it might be worth taking a look at that. And with that, let’s move into today’s closing round. Marc, Jürgen, Sabine, Layla — what were your highlights? What are you taking away from today’s room? Marc?
What I’m taking away from this room is that I want to stay in motion, and not just professionally. And I do it so I can keep acting on my own terms. And that immediately makes me think of staying mentally in motion too.
Jürgen?
I liked it a lot. What I especially liked, and honestly wouldn’t have expected, is how many people were up on stage for this particular topic today, and contributed in such an enriching way once again. And right at the end, allow me one small dig, back to the topic of extremism — dear Yasemin, please keep in mind, just as with beauty, the saying goes that extremism, too, lies in the eye of the beholder. Thank you for this wonderful room today, and have a lovely day, everyone.
Thank you so much. Sabine?
Yes, a wonderful room again, and you really notice how the world of sport has changed — the topic of healthy sport wasn’t nearly as prominent when I was a kid. When you see things like yoga and so on today, so much has changed — and I think what’s also changed is awareness of sport and fitness at an older age. That wasn’t really a thing before either, I think. What I wanted to say about Jürgen — he really learned a lot in every respect. He also learned to tread water, so to speak — my nephew played water polo on the national team, and that’s a pretty rough sport, you really have to be able to hold your own there. Wonderful. I wish you all a lovely day.
Thank you so much. Layla?
What’s stuck with me most is this idea of motives, in both the literal and figurative sense — what’s my motivation? I’ve held onto the keywords struggle and joy for myself, and earlier there was also a brief mention of overcoming your own inner resistance, which is always in focus too. I’ve decided that, for myself personally, and I’d really wish this for myself, I don’t want to be my own opponent, but my own friend. And I know it always seems to be framed as a competition, but I want to strengthen the unity between body and mind instead. And those should be the underlying motives, for me personally, at least. And yes, maybe that’s one more thought to close on.
Thank you so much. What I found especially exciting was seeing just how many different directions we ended up going in today — the sheer variety that came together. And I’m really happy about that. And I think tomorrow will be similar, when we welcome Ria Nolte for an expert talk on the topic of violence in art. And there too, we’ll open up different levels, not just what might seem obvious, but really look at it from various perspectives. So I’m looking forward to continuing tomorrow with violence in art, and you’re all very warmly invited to join us again at 8am. Until then — take care. Ciao!
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