The boycott of Russian sportsmen during the next 11 years (in the same way that the IOC and FIFA banned South African sportsmen due to Apartheid between 1962 and 1992) allows us not only to put pressure on the psychopath Putin but also allows to try to free Humanity from the rising cult of ignorance https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/11/attenborough-versus-ronaldo-or.html and the absurdity of the existence of a higher inequality of opportunity in top science than in Olympic prizes has was recently shown in a paper published in the journal Scientometrics which is proof that many scientific talents have been and will continue to be wasted thus damaging to the future of Humanity.
Declaration of competing interests – As I wrote several years ago (see email below) competitive sports are just a meaningless and unsustainable waste of resources.
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De: F. Pacheco Torgal
Enviado: 15 de Fevereiro de 2018 8:05
Assunto: Another relic of the XX century that Academia does not need
Competitive sports are just a die-hard relic of the XX century but the most bizarre thing is that Universities fell into the temptation to please a rising sports market and as a consequence sports performance has even become a science worth university status. Competitive sports are just something that comes from a past of survival, of competition to the death, of winners and losers, of us versus them. Of race improvement and eugenics. Of males fighting each other in order to be able to mate with many females as possible to pass their “superior” genes. That´s a narrative that we do not need in the 21 century. Even Olympic games make no sense in the 21 century because the heroes (the role models) of this century ought to be those that help Humanity to solve their many and worrying problems, not those that spend thousands of hours training in order to be the human that runs faster, jumps higher or that throws a heavy object to a longer distance. That´s nothing more than a meaningless and unsustainable waste of resources. If the work of the intellectuals is to transform the unthinkable into plausible it would be a great achievement if Academia were able to convince society about how highly competitive sports keep us imprisoned to our tribal past thus preventing the advancement of Humanity towards the type 1 civilization that we need and hope to become.
Pacheco-Torgal 