12 juil. 2019

Triathlon and the Alternative Facts


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.

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