Sports played a huge role in my life. I very much enjoyed and still enjoy doing sports as well as watching sporting events. Earlier in my life I was engaged in more than 10 sporting disciplines, and I reached a “Master of Sport” level in fencing and some other merits in boxing, volleyball and tennis. In short, sports were a big part of my life and played an important role in the development of my personality and character. This is why I appreciate sports so much.
However, recently I catch myself criticizing certain aspects of sport – particularly its winning obsession. Winning is almost everything in any sport. People may enjoy movements, skills, mastery, techniques and the team-spirit of sportsmen, but still for the majority of people, sport is all about winning.
Who is the winner? That is a Hamlet’s question in sport. Even at amateur levels, among ordinary members of a sports club, the most vital thing is the defining the winner or winners. Everybody is primarily interested in one matter. Sometimes sportsmen destroy themselves physically or mentally, enter into a severe interpersonal or intergroup conflict trying to achieve the result – to win.
Regrettably, the glory of winning overshadows all other sides of sports including its beauty, improvement of health, confidence building as well as the loss of fear of competing. But in a social sense that is not too bad at all: it is better to allow people to fight in sports than in wars. At professional levels this also affects the business: winning in sport can bring money and big winning could create a big fortune. Furthermore, winning also brings prestige including a national prestige.
Though this is understandable, the winning mania of sport is still a bit bizarre for me.
Alisher Faizullaev 
Strong health, good feeling and a beautiful body can be achieved by doing regular individual exercises like running mornings, playing football Sundays, attending swimming pool, fitness centers, etc. All this is sport.
But the only thing, in my opinion, that make sport a great event, make it as exciting as nothing else, is sense of winning. Hard competitiveness, struggle until the end are the very things that make us enjoy watching the matches live on TV or on-site.
Would sport be as enjoyable as it does to us without the sense of winning? I think no.
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