Danny Bright
Can somebody please explain why anybody involved with sport might feel compelled to announce how proud they are to be involved in a sport which is “about community, diversity and inclusion”?
I happened to catch the tail end of the US Open Squash final from Philadelphia on Sky TV. New Zealander Paul Coll is currently ranked number 5 in the world, so I took a few minutes to see how he’d been going. Eliminated in the quarter final by world number 1 Mohamed ElShorbagy. Not too shabby – but I digress.
At the trophy presentation after the match, one of the main sponsors made a speech applauding his involvement in sponsorship of a sport that is all about “community, diversity and inclusion”.
Really? Silly me, I thought sport was about competition. The sole intent being to thrash the opposition, not include them. One is either the thrasher or the thrashee and there can be little to do with community, diversity or inclusion in any of that.
One might take pride in playing a sport as a representative of a particular community and that’s fair enough, but suggesting a sport is “about community” is just plain nonsense. What was he thinking?
Declaring a sport to be about diversity and inclusion is surely equally nonsensical. Other than expecting people to be of a certain grade and skill in the specific sport for the level they’re playing at, is there any sport that somehow excludes anybody? Doesn’t everybody who wants to, get to participate? I mean you wouldn’t want the world snooker champion playing the US Squash Open just in the interests of diversity would you? How painful that would be to watch. Great for the sponsors too.
Seriously, this can only be about using the trendy, meaningless, buzzwords of today’s virtue signalers.
People who are diverse from each other are highly unlikely to find themselves playing the same sport. That’s what diversity means: being different from each other – and long may we remain so.
Who wants to be included for the sake of inclusion in a community that they don’t fit into?
While I didn’t much like what this guy had to say for various reasons, I sincerely hope that his use of diversity and inclusion didn’t mean he wants men who have reassigned their gender to be allowed to participate in women’s sport. We have way too much of that from mealy mouthed officials already.