Opinion | Let’s celebrate sport for no other reason than the sheer joy of it

Are Hong Kong people crazy about sport? There seems to be evidence aplenty that they are. Every time Hong Kong’s football team pulls off a win in a World Cup qualifier, the entire city goes into a frenzy.

Lee Lai-shan, the windsurfing gold medallist at the 1996 Olympics and Sarah Lee Wai-sze, who won a bronze medal at the London Olympics, have become Hong Kong’s favourite daughters. And 19-year-old Rex Tso Sing-yu, having gone through 19 professional bouts without defeat, is now a local hero and a role model for teenagers.

All this, however, only shows that everybody loves a winner and Hongkongers are no exception. The fact is, in this city, sport is seldom appreciated in its own right and celebrated for its own sake.

Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah, himself a fencer, never fails to find time to cheer for the Hong Kong team or local athletes competing at high-profile sports events, either on his blog or by visiting the events.

Yet he talks about sport in mainly economic terms, focusing on how sports events can be big business giving impetus to a huge chain of related industries such as advertising, food and beverages, tourism and hotels. When our athletes win in a big way, he also suggests, they can unite the community by fostering a sense of pride in its members.

But sport isn’t just about winning and it’s certainly not only for the winners. More than anything else, it’s about participation and having a good time. The Irish novelist Iris Murdoch was certainly no champion swimmer. Yet she loved the sport because, when swimming, she felt “cured of all ailments and dissatisfactions, as of all other longings”. Swimming, she wrote, like dying, seems to solve all problems but you remain alive.

To the American philosopher Henry David Thoreau, the great joy of walking lies not in mechanically putting one foot in front of the other en route to a destination but in mastering the art of sauntering.