When Did Performance Stop Being Beautiful?

Once, the beauty of sport was inseparable from the brilliance of performance. You could see it in the way Federer gracefully glided through each point, or how Zidane hugged the ball close to his feet as if it were his most precious belonging. Artistry wasn’t extra. It was the point.

But increasingly, excellence is measured by how well athletes match a stat. Speed, power, explosiveness, all easily quantified, tested, and pre-determined to be maximized. Coaches as well as the most esteemed journalists speak in KPIs. Talent pipelines resemble talent farms.

In some areas of Europe, ballet still scouts children whose anatomy fits a technical ideal, arched feet, hyper-flexible limbs, torsos meeting exact specifications. But even there, artistry is taught. Grace is practiced. Beauty is cultivated.

Across the West and almost as a given., we’ve borrowed the selection model but somehow left the artistry behind. We celebrate genetic outliers, not learned mastery. The result is what we see on many fields and courts: strong bodies chasing outcomes, unsure why the joy is gone.

High performance is increasingly confused with high achievement. One is structural and repeatable. The other is a momentary result, too often tangled up with self-worth. We learn to score, but not to perform. To win, but not to create.

Performance, at its best, is elegant, not in the fleeting or superficial sense of aesthetics, but in the structural sense: an economy of means, a clarity of intention, a rhythm of execution. There is no formula for it. But there is a structure that supports it.

When the structure is strategically designed, beauty returns and perhaps with it, the joy of a mastery we can all recognize.