“Everything
has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and
beginning all over again.” Andre Gide.
https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/andre_gide
“Fiction is history that might
have happened. History is fiction that did happen.”André Gide. The Counterfeiters.
These two quotes of André
Gide are the backbones of the project. Working
around champions gives an idea of the requirements to create a champion. We have to assume that nobody listens and
begin all over again, this statement is not related to somebody in particular
but to athletes. At the same time, we have to create a
History that could help us to grow. It
was pointed out in our previous post.
People are willing
to believe in alternative facts because reality is overwhelming. We become delirious
believing in alternatives facts or psychotics when we see reality the way it
is; training to face reality and alternative facts is needed if we want to
achieve something with athletes.
As André Gide said: “Everything
has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and
beginning all over again.” This is a touchy subject, repeating and insisting, starting all over again. We have to do it with every athlete if we
expect results. Mike Tyson said it
when he talks about Cus D’Amato. Here, we repeated the same thing again.
We started talking about
Postmodernism and alternative facts more than 30 years ago.The end of the Grand Narratives began and the
appearance of the Alternative Facts started. Donald Trump and Andrés Manuel López Obrador
come to my mind in today’s world.At one-point,
psychoanalysis was criticized by Jacques Derrida because of the alternative
facts.Triathlon represented by athletes,
coaches and Federations are full of alternative facts to keep their businesses going.People are willing to believe in
alternative facts because reality is overwhelming.We become delirious believing in alternatives
facts or psychotics when we see reality the way it is; training to face reality
and alternative facts is needed if we want to achieve something with athletes.
In the last World Series and
Mixed Relay, Hamburg, four times the Mexican team was lapped, just one ended in
40th place; four out of the five competitions.How can we face this overwhelming
reality!Alternative facts! We have
problems dealing with reality and alternative facts:
It’s because so much of what we know depends on the truthfulness of
others that the philosopher Immanuel Kant believed lying was always wrong. His
reasoning was that when we lie to another person, we fail to respect her
infinitely valuable capacity to encounter the world and think about the moral
choices she’ll make in it. By refusing to tell her the truth, we treat her not
as a person, but as an instrument — a tool to get something we want. We treat
her like a thing…When we routinely assume that our fellow citizens and
government officials are lying, it becomes impossible to work together to
determine how our neighborhoods, our cities, or our country should function.
When we abandon the effort to figure out what is true, we cede the field to
anti-democratic leaders who derive their “just powers” not “from the consent of the
governed” but from the acquiescence of the willingly deceived.
There is no point in showing
the comments related to this Mexican performance: hundreds of alternative facts
with one of two comments looking at the reality. Reality is difficult to see except for people like Mike Tyson.
Mike Tyson speaks clearly
about Constantine D’Amato.He believed
that Cus was crazy because he thought Mike was invincible in a fair fight.Mike believes Cus uses alternative facts when
he says such a thing, but the reality is that Cus had 50 years’ experience in
boxing and knew how to produce someone like it.Boxing children lived in his house.
“You do what I tell you to do and if it doesn’t work, then you can leave.”
“I’m not a creator. What I do is discover and uncover. See my job is to take the spark and fan it. When it starts to become a little flame I feed it, and I feed the fire until it becomes a roaring blaze, and then when it turns to a roaring blaze I pour used logs on it. Then you really got a fire going.”
“I don’t allow people to intimidate me, for no other reason than to set an example for my boxers.”
“Remember, it’s always good to throw the punch where you can hit him and he can’t hit you. That’s what the science of boxing is all about.”
“I feel that all boys growing up in the environment that he did would require help, patience and perhaps understanding cos’ I try to make them feel, and I hope I did, that I understand this kind of life. I grew up in a tough neighbourhood mysef.”
At the end, Mike ended up
with his beliefs without the overwhelming anger he developed growing up.
Cus D’Amato is not here anymore, but we know that there are people like him, we continue preparing ourselves to
look at reality without fear and with the will to face it. Alternative Facts are not an option for us.
What to teach is something
we take seriously, but how to create the environment to help athletes to learn
is more important. It is what every
country wants or what they say they want; to improve education and wellbeing
for the citizens. The infrastructure,
meaning the environment needed, should to be accepted by members: triathletes,
coaches, federations and nations.
Selling the idea is not an easy task; and selling the idea when other personal
needs are stronger is even more difficult.
In the case of Mexico, we try to convince people that there is a problem
in education, but our President says that he has a different data, contrary to
the OCDE. Let’s be serious and take the case of France:
Reconciling educational
excellence and success for all is not just the best way to tackle social
inequalities at the root, but also to obtain good results.
Results from around the
globe illustrate various best practices applied to improve the equity and
performance of the education system. Portugal’s TEIP programme for example
(Priority Intervention Education Territories) targets investment in
geographical regions where the population is socially disadvantaged and where
school drop-out rates are higher than the national average. Singapore, first in the PISA
science rankings, has a comprehensive teacher evaluation system that includes
in particular the contribution to students’ personal and academic development,
as well as the quality of parent-teacher relations.
In short, the capacity of
a system to help students in difficulty and those from disadvantaged
backgrounds to improve raises the general quality of the system and thus its
overall performance.
In France however, investments in education do not always reach
these groups. I had some personal experience of this malfunctioning when I
arrived in France and asked people to recommend primary schools for my own children.
The answer was: “Don’t
pick a school, pick a neighbourhood”.
How can we ensure that success at school isn’t the result of a
postcode lottery? France has already implemented reforms going in the right
direction.
Creating the environment in countries
like Mexico is possible, but it is micro environment within the country. Educating the huge bureaucratic apparatus is impossible,
and even more when the head of the system, CONADE, barely finished High School (certificate
equivalent to a GED). We gave up trying
educating the bureaucracy and limited ourselves to educate six to eight parents. Our micro-system produced a world champion
but so far we cannot influence a bigger population. Perhaps this is our fate, but we continue
trying to teach with the example.
