Olympics week. What sport teaches children about their bodies.

I watch the Olympics with children every four years and I always notice the same thing: the questions change around day three. The first questions are about the sport — how does this work, how do you score that, why did she fall. By day three the questions are about the athletes — how long did they practise, do they have normal lives, do they have friends, are they happy.

The shift from the sport to the person is the shift I'm most interested in. The child who asks 'do they have friends?' is asking about the cost of the achievement. They are intuiting, without being told, that the level of performance they are watching requires something. They want to know what it requires.

The honest answer: it requires years. It requires years of deliberate practice, which means years of doing the thing the same way thousands of times, with feedback, with intention. It also requires sacrifice — of ordinary childhood time, of other activities, of some of the unstructured July mornings that Marian writes about. The child watching the Olympic gymnast is watching twelve years of mornings that looked nothing like a July morning.

The shift from the sport to the person is the shift I'm most interested in. The child who asks 'do they have friends?' is asking about the cost of the achievement. They are intuiting, without being told, that the level of performance they are watching requires something.