REAL LIFE MARKETING RESEARCH

Real life Marketing Research

Real life Marketing Research

Competition is something that most of the British community seems to accept as an integral part of everyday life. Even when individuals try not to compete, some type of competition can be observed in their behavior. With respect to games and athletics, the positive aspects of competition usually overshadow any negative effects of participation. Winning cannot obviously be a positive outcome of competition. Also, competition allows one's performance to be measured against others, helps establish criterion levels for oneself, and provides an opportunity for social interaction with individuals having similar interests. Few critique or analyze the events regarding the potential negative aspects of losing, and, furthermore, very few efforts are made to design a competitive format in athletics that truly emphasizes participation rather than winning. Olympics is an organization that has sought to provide quality movement experiences in the field of games to all the athletes around the world and provides all form of competition without focusing entirely on the winning of the events. While winning is a goal (by the very nature of competition), the focus for individuals is that they all, whether normal or with disabilities, should be performing to the best of their abilities. In a competitive race, the goal for the athlete is to be the first participant finished. However, the stated emphasis or point of concentration in Olympics is the effort to finish.

The opening stanza of Georges Hohrod and M. Eschbach's 1912 Olympic Games Fine Arts Competition gold winning “Ode to Sport” reads:

O Sport, delight of the Gods, distillation of life!

In the grey dingle of modern existence, restless with barren toil, you

suddenly appeared like the shining messenger of vanished ages, those ages

when humanity could smile. And to the mountain tops came dawn's first

glimmer, and sunbeams dappled the forest's gloomy floor. (629)

In the subsequent eight stanzas of the work, sport is defined as beauty, justice, daring, honor, joy, fecundity, progress and peace. Sport, described as inspiring wholesomeness and judiciousness, promises to:

…forge happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in

reverence for strength which is controlled, organised and self disciplined

[sic]. Through you the young of all the world learn to respect one another,

and thus the diversity of national traits becomes a source of generous and

peaceful emulation (Hohrod and Eschbach, 1912, 630).

It was later revealed that Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Movement and Games, had written “Ode to Sport” using pseudonyms so that he could enter the Olympics arts competition. The poem outlines the ideological foundations and assumptions of Olympism, which can be understood as a combination of Muscular Christianity, fin-de-siecle Internationalism and Neo-Hellenism. Coubertin positioned Olympism as a salve to what he believed to be the ills of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like many of his contemporaries, he was concerned that industrialization and urbanization had torn apart Europe's social fabric and had created a generation of undisciplined and effeminate young ...