Michael Moynihan: Sport, cruelty, and the cruelty of sport

Sport’s flat binaries, its winners and losers, don’t allow for moral victories: when it comes to victory there can be only one, despite the best efforts of the high jumpers

Simone Biles watches the Women's Uneven Bars Final from the stands at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre on the ninth day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Picture: Mike Egerton/PA Wire.

The cruelty of sport.

This is one of the foundational cliches of sports-talk, one of the load-bearing pillars that was in place from the very start of sports discourse and which has served us well ever since.