This is the age of the slogan, the soundbite, the snappy phrase in place of considered argument. Thought is dying; reason’s gone critical. In bookshops and magazine racks we’re told only what we want to hear: we’re told it in neat, bullet-pointed affirmations of our own worth.

No more. This is the fightback. The resuscitation. This is the slogan as explainer of the world. One a day for a year. Three hundred and sixty five phrases, soundbites and bullet points with which to make sense of the way things are now and point to how things could be tomorrow. Read them and weep.


Friday

7. Sport is where Men become as Gods

So said the Ancient Greeks. And it is in the sporting arena that these Gods push themselves to levels of endurance and achievement way beyond the human. Roger Bannister bursting his lungs to break the four-minute mile, flying in the face of accepted medical and scientific fact…his great opponent, John Landy, smashing his time by a full second and a half just one month later – that’s superhuman. But when the two men faced each other later that same summer in a race dubbed ‘The Miracle Mile’ – that was something else entirely. That’s when the sport became an allegory for something both powerfully human and gloriously divine. If sport at its most inspirational is a distillation of human endeavour, a symbol of man’s need to strive for physical excellence, then when it’s taken to its very limit, the resulting spectacle says something fundamental about what it is to be human... and what it is to be God.
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