Walking is not a sport.
Sport is a matter of techniques and rules, scores and competition, necessitating lengthy training: knowing the postures, learning the right movements. Then, a long time later, come improvisation and talent.
Sport is keeping score: what’s your ranking? Your time? Your place in the results? Always the same division between victor and vanquished that there is in war – there is a kinship between war and sport, one that honours war and dishonours sport: respect for the adversary; hatred of the enemy.
Sport also obviously means cultivation of endurance, of a taste for effort, for discipline. An ethic. A labour.
But then again it is material: reviews, spectacles, a market. It is performance. Sport gives rise to immense mediatic ceremonies, crowded with consumers of brands and images. Money invades it to empty souls, medical science to construct artificial bodies.
Walking is not a sport. Putting one foot in front of the other is child’s play. When walkers meet, there is no result, no time: the walker may say which way he has come, mention the best path for viewing the landscape, what can be seen from this or that promontory.
Efforts have nevertheless been made to create a new market in accessories: revolutionary shoes, incredible socks, high-performance trousers … the sporting spirit is being surreptitiously introduced, you no longer walk but do a ‘trek’. Pointed staffs are on sale to give walkers the appearance of improbable skiers. But none of that goes very far. It can’t go far.
Walking is the best way to go more slowly than any other method that has ever been found. To walk, you need to start with two legs. The rest is optional. If you want to go faster, then don’t walk, do something else: drive, slide or fly. Don’t walk. And when you are walking, there is only one sort of performance that counts: the brilliance of the sky, the splendour of the landscape. Walking is not a sport.
Once on his feet, though, man does not stay where he is.