Sport is Art: what a Performance Reveals.

What do we reveal when we test our courage, our craft, and our limits?

When we walk into an art museum, we intuitively understand that we are looking at more than paint on a canvas. Someone made this. Someone chose these colors, these shapes, this subject. Behind the work is a person trying to express something. When someone tells you that you are looking at art we tend to view it through a different lens.

We approach music, literature, photography, and film with a similar understanding. Whatever the subject, we recognize that the work carries something of its creator.

As an artist, I feel that connection deeply. A painting can become a kind of autobiography, even when nothing about it appears autobiographical. Our choices reveal us. Intentionally or unintentionally, we leave something of ourselves in what we create. Our fingerprints are on the work.

The art work becomes a signature. A declaration of self.

I was here! I experienced this. I made something of it.

One of art’s main goals is to convey meaning through expression. What meaning? I think ultimately the meaning of life, what it means to be human, to learn, to grow, to feel. Experiencing art as a spectator and through the process of making art can teach us who we are and give us insight into the deeper meaning and mysteries of life.

I believe sport offers us that same opportunity. There are few better ways to learn about yourself than to commit to sport. But we rarely teach people to see it that way.

We are taught to look at the scoreboard.

Who won? Who lost? Who broke the record? Who made the cut? At the professional level, we add contracts, salaries, and endorsements. We learn to understand performance through what it earns.

The athlete does the work to gain the “thing”, and the “thing” becomes the measure of the work. But what happens when we look at an athletic performance with the same attention we bring to a work of art?

We begin to see the person.

We see years of practice taking shape in a moment. We see craft, preparation, judgment, and courage. We see an athlete encountering resistance and deciding how to respond. We see where they are in the long process of learning what they can do.

The athletic performance like a piece of art becomes an expression of self. 

Think about the athletes who have moved you. Some won. Some did not. Yet something about their performance stayed with you. Something more subjective than then score. Perhaps it was the beauty of the movement. Perhaps they risked more than you expected. Perhaps they held their composure when everything began to unravel. Perhaps they continued with a courage you recognized because you understood how difficult continuing had become.

Their place in the results could not fully describe what you witnessed. They tested their limits, and in the testing, they showed you something of themselves. This is rare but maybe it’s rare because we haven’t been trained to aspire for it?

For the athlete, this changes the question at the center of competition. Alongside What can I achieve?comes another question:

What am I willing to express?

My preparation. My courage. My understanding of the craft. My willingness to stay present when the experience becomes uncomfortable or uncertain.

Swimming is a medium for that expression. So are running, gymnastics, basketball, and every other sport. The artist works through paint, sound, or language. The athlete works through movement, decisions, and effort within the demands of the game.

The more I consider this, the more I believe sport is art.

As an artist, I work through a medium to explore and express something. That expression deepens as I come to understand my materials, my subject, and my purpose. It also deepens as I come to understand myself. Sometimes I begin a painting knowing what I want to say. Sometimes the work helps me discover it. In my view, that exploration is one of art’s deepest purposes. The artist creates something while also learning something about the person creating it.

Sport offers that same possibility with an immediacy I find difficult to match. Our bodies participate in the questions. We encounter fatigue, fear, uncertainty, and the limits of our preparation. We make decisions under pressure. We discover where we are willing to commit and where we hesitate. Sport can be an ultimate teacher of self.

And the experience changes us. Each time we return to the work, we have an opportunity to develop our skill and our understanding of ourselves.

That gives training a deeper purpose. We practice until our movements can carry our intentions more faithfully. As our craft develops, we gain greater freedom to respond, to create, and to express what we have prepared ourselves to give.

The swimmer’s art exists in that meeting of preparation and possibility: a human being using everything they have learned to discover what they can do.

Steve Prefontaine comes to mind when I think about this. His approach to running makes sense to me through this lens: the race as an opportunity to discover and reveal what he could give. His famous words capture that challenge:

“To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.”

I hear a call to use what we have. To enter the experience fully enough to learn something from it. That requires honesty, and athletes know how difficult honesty can be. We know the difference between committing to an effort and leaving ourselves an escape. We know the temptation to hold something back so that, afterward, we can tell ourselves we could have done more. There is comfort in protecting an untested version of our potential.

Giving ourselves fully means risking the discovery that our best today may fall short of what we hoped.

That takes courage.

An honest performance can include mistakes, fear, poor judgment, and disappointment. It can happen on a day when our bodies do not respond as we expected. Honesty asks us to engage with the circumstances we actually have and make the fullest use of what is available.

It also asks us to learn. Sometimes courage means pressing forward. Sometimes it means recognizing a limitation, changing an approach, or admitting that we need help. Mastery requires attention as well as effort.

As a coach, I want athletes to develop that relationship with their sport. I want them to pursue ambitious goals and care deeply about how they perform. I also want them to understand what those goals are for.

A goal can give direction to the work. It cannot tell us the worth of the person doing it.

When achievement becomes our only measure, satisfaction is always vulnerable to the next comparison. We make the cut and discover another cut. We break a record and notice a faster one. We win and begin worrying about whether we can win again.

Where does it end? At what point have we achieved enough to feel that we are enough?

I cannot explain another athlete’s inner life, and I would never reduce depression or the difficulty of leaving sport to a single cause. But I can speak about the cost of that way of thinking in my own life.

My athletic career ended in tears.

They were tears of disappointment, and something close to grief. I felt that I had failed to become the swimmer I believed I could have been. Years of work and what was it for?

I had built so much of my identity around being a swimmer—and, specifically, a successful swimmer—that the gap between my expectations and my results felt personal. My accomplishments seemed small beside those of the people one step ahead of me.

There was always someone one step ahead.

I struggled to see my career as a whole: the work, the relationships, the courage, the learning, and the opportunities I had taken to test myself. I kept returning to what I had not achieved.

The disappointment reached beyond how I felt about my swimming. It affected how I felt about myself. Looking back, I wish I had understood that there were other questions worth asking. Another purpose. Another goal. 

Had I learned to work with purpose? Had I become more skillful, more aware, more willing to face difficulty? Had I given myself honestly to the experience? Where had I held back, and what could that teach me?

The truth is I did answer some of those questions but only through the lens of achievement. I was closed off to a bigger purpose and a more meaningful experience and ultimately my greatest potential for the performance I longed for. 

That is the opportunity I see for the athletes we coach.

We can help them build a pursuit that remains meaningful through success, failure, and eventually the end of competition. We can teach our athletes to recognize growth that a result cannot fully record. We can ask them to take ownership of their preparation and bring their attention, skill, and courage into the arena.

I also believe this can help them perform at or near their physical potential. An athlete who is fully engaged in the work has more attention available for the decisions and movements the performance requires. Fear of what a result might say about them does not have to occupy every corner of the experience. There is no guarantee of a medal in that approach. There is an opportunity to become a more capable athlete and a person who understands themselves more clearly.

So I would challenge both participants and spectators to look again.

Watch the race. Respect the result. Then look closely at what happened within it.

What did the athlete attempt? What did they risk? How did they respond? What did their preparation allow them to express?

Consider how difficult it is to name the greatest artist.

What would we measure? Skill? Emotional depth? The freedom of their expression? Their ability to make us feel something, recognize something, or see the world differently? What about the meaning of the work, the message it carries, or the connection it creates?

Would we settle those questions by counting awards, comparing auction prices, or adding up the money an artist earned?

Those things tell us something about recognition and commercial success. They leave much of what makes the work meaningful unanswered.

Then what makes a great athlete?

Sport gives us precise measurements, and those measurements matter. A race has a winner. A record marks a real accomplishment. But can we also look at a performance with the eyes we bring to fine art—with enough attention to appreciate its skill, its beauty, its courage, and its power to connect us to another human being?

Can we recognize greatness in what an athlete expresses, even when someone else touches the wall first?

I believe we can. As a coach, an athlete, and an artist, I believe we should.

And if you are the athlete, ask yourself what you want to bring to that moment. How will you show the world who you are?

You have spent years learning your medium. You have practiced its movements, encountered its resistance, and developed your craft.

Now you have an opportunity to make something of it.

Something honest enough to say:

I was here. This is what I had to give.