On Cool Runnings, Sporting Failure, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Sometimes I think I can trace back all the delusions I have about my life to the film Cool Runnings. Inspired by the true story of the first Jamaican bobsled team, the film follows sprinter Derice Bannock who, after failing to qualify for the Summer Olympics in the hundred meters, teams up with disgraced former bobsledder Irv Blitzer to form a Winter Olympic team. The world, predictably, scoffs at the idea of Jamaicans competing in a winter sport, but despite the ridicule they qualify for the 1988 Calgary Games. There, they face judgment and hostility from their competitors—all of whom the film portrays as blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and cartoonishly accented. Against all odds they mount a late charge for a medal.
The film’s dramatic finale sees the team crash out violently on the twisting, icy track. As paramedics rush toward their sled, they regroup, lift it themselves, and carry it over the finish line. A crowd of flag-waving spectators watches in roused disbelief, a slow clap (started, naturally, by the once-antagonistic Swiss captain) swells into full-blown applause. The music crescendos. “You did good, Jamaica,” the Swiss captain says. “We’ll see you in four years, ja?” To which Derice replies, in his broad Jamaican accent, “Yea man.”
Despite how I’m making it sound, it’s a genuinely powerful scene—somehow managing to smuggle questions of race, geopolitics, ambition, and sporting failure into the broad tone of a Disney family comedy. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, it was also one of those films that seemed to play endlessly on British terrestrial TV in the 2000s, usually on a Sunday afternoon. Because of that, it’s hard to say exactly when I first saw it. What I do know is that at some point I recorded it onto VHS straight from one of those broadcasts, so I could rewind key scenes and give Derice and his teammates the attention I felt they deserved. I have always had what you might call an obsessive personality, my brain latching onto various subjects to help give it focus or else to distract it from something harder to name.And yet, there has usually been some kind of logic to the fixations, some reason why, for a time, a given thing (setting crosswords, playing online chess, counting the exact number of bites it takes for me to chew things) held my interest.So why, when my peers were all collecting football stickers or playing Club Penguin, was I repeatedly rewatching Cool Runnings?
Looking back, I have some theories. First, it was a film about sport. At that age, sport was one of the only things I understood to exist beyond my own experience. I knew that there were people who were exceptionally good at specific activities, that others paid to watch them, and that they’d be talked about for days afterward. I also think I recognised in Derice’s struggle something of the iterative pleasures familiar to any obsessive: repetition, simplicity, the education of attention on something hyper-specific. In the case of sport, all of it building towards a form of improvement that felt both visible and just, where effort could be translated cleanly into progress, inputs proportional to outputs, change equal to the energy you exerted. Second, and perhaps more simply, it was a film set in the Caribbean. My grandfather was a Bajan who emigrated to Wales in the 1940s and the region had always held a vague, inherited sense of significance.
Maybe it was because my grandfather had recently died that I decided to rewatch the film. What struck me, seeing it again after more than fifteen years, was something different. I was reminded, first, of how vulnerable I still am to the kind of monocausal narrative explanations that drive these sport-films: the way that they leave me feeling like I have been lied to about my life and exactly what I should expect from it (watching people win or lose at sport remains one of the most reliable ways to make me cry). Second, how easy it is to forget that in pure sporting terms, the Jamaican bobsled team failed spectacularly. They had made it to the Olympics, but they were still orders of magnitude worse than everyone else there. The other teams were better trained in ways that couldn’t easily be measured. As athletes, they could match them, but none of it mattered in the event.
Sport, I had to remind myself, doesn’t operate according to the rules of film or literature. For all its dramas, it is not drama. Even though it involves people, at the highest level it is often deeply impersonal. In real life, after losing control of the sled the Jamaican team never finished their final run, and subsequently were listed as not finishing at all. Their official place: last overall.
Several years later, I started playing basketball. It wasn’t quite as improbable as a Jamaican taking up bobsleigh. But still, a Welsh teenager trying to make it to the NBA carried a similar strain of unlikely comedy. No doubt inspired by my early interpretation of that film, I framed my interest in the sport as the first step in a narrative chain of cause and effect that would lead, inevitably, to a professional career in America.
This imagined journey continued uninterrupted, and without much genuine progress, until at sixteen I was spotted by a coach at a basketball camp in a city a few hours from my home. I had been playing well, managing to stand out in some way among the other boys—few of whom, I imagined, were subjecting themselves to the same monk-like sacraments and trials I had built into my own training. After a game, the coach pulled me aside, took down my mother’s email and phone number, and invited me to trials for the age-group national team. I remember the feeling of almost vain delight—not only was this happening to me, but I had been right. There was a direct relationship between my own efforts and external results. I was being rewarded, I told myself, for having understood that.
On the day of the trials, some months later, my mother drove me along the Heads of the Valleys Road towards the address the coach had sent. We turned off from Merthyr Tydfil onto narrower, steeper roads, then descended to the valley floor. Eventually, my mother pulled into a car park that spread out around a cluster of grey-brickedbuildings with corrugated iron roofs, the valley rising sheer on either side. Inside, the receptionist directed us through tunnel-like halls, past a swimming pool, and towards the basketball courts at the back. There, I walked in to find a group of nervous looking boys going through the tense ritualism of their warm-ups.
For the next four hours, we engaged in an essentially Darwinian system of selection. The two full courts were split into halves, with mini-games running simultaneously on each separated section of the court. Every twenty minutes or so, a whistle would blow, and players would be shifted up or down a court according to their performance. Slowly, the best players filtered towards the top right-hand court, where most of the coaches had gathered, leaving the other games running largely unobserved. Again, with the same feeling of self-satisfied pleasure, I found myself on this top court. The following week, I got a call from the head coach telling me I had made it onto the team aimed at the European Championships sixteen months down the line.
The FIBA European Championship Under-18s Division C was the lowest tier of all the officially sanctioned European competitions, made up of teams from some of the continent’s smallest nations. As far as international competition goes, it was close to the bottom of the barrel. But that didn’t matter to me. As far as I was concerned, I had been vindicated. There had always been the hope, now there was the opportunity to be tested, to prove that I was equal to my own imagined gifts.
The FIBA European Championships Division C was set to be hosted in Andorra, a tiny country just north of Catalunya and one of the participating nations itself. We would play in their national arena and be housed in a nearby hotel, along with every other player from every competing team. Most of the tournament’s other participating countries were microstates, principalities or tax havens with some of the world’s highest GDPs per capita: Luxembourg, Malta, San Marino. The kind of places where residents live according to the social calendars of the super-rich—skiing and Davos in January, the Monaco grand prix in May, yacht week in July, Frieze Masters in October. In hindsight, it was a world almost comically far removed from the basketball I had grown up with, steeped as it was in the culture of Black America. Of course, that culture had nothing to do with Wales either, but at the very least, I could see some shared sense of economic subjugation between the Welsh valleys and America’s inner cities. By that logic, I began to convince myself that Wales were the tournament’s moral underdogs. The thinking went something like this: if sport was a natural form of storytelling—where the randomness of real-life outcomes met the controlled structure of rules—then surely, by the logic of drama, we should beat the tax havens. That was simply how things worked.
After a string of underwhelming warm-up tournaments and a few charity fundraisers to cover our costs, we flew to Barcelona, then took a bus up to Andorra. We checked into our hotel ahead of our first game, against the only country I had found no moral reason to dismiss—Moldova, a post-Soviet state and one of the poorest countries in Europe.
That game was my first real encounter with what it means to be outclassed. Moldova’s best player was a forward named Dimitri Korolov. He was freakishly large, 6″9, with enormous, plate-like hands. In my memory, he had something robotic about him, like a machine built solely to play basketball. I can only picture him staring blankly, expressionless and barely speaking.Most of all, though, he was just much, much better than any of us at basketball. We lost that first game by one point. Korolov had 40 on his own.
Back at the hotel, I kept refreshing an article on the FIBA website that read: “Wales was led by Jamie Cameron’s 19 points and 11 rebounds.” I sent it to my mother and to my friends at home. But privately, I couldn’t stop thinking about Korolov. It wasn’t just that he was much better than I was—that was so obvious it didn’t even register as something painful exactly. It was more the cumulative weight of the realisation. I couldn’t imagine anyone having trained harder than I had—the hours of drills, the monkish self-denial—so where had Korolov’s surplus of talent come from? What hidden arrangement of factors—his childhood, his physical dimensions, his psychology, his access to coaching, his culture—had produced a player so clearly beyond my reach? The holes in my philosophy were starting to show. After all, we were at the FIBA Division C Championships. What would Division B look like? Or Division A? What about the top professional leagues in Europe? And above that, someone sat at the end of an NBA bench? And further still—the best players in the world? The thought regressed, stretching out into the distance. The further I followed it, the more unbearable the scale of my own inferiority became.
The day after our game against Moldova, we had no scheduled match, so we took the opportunity to practise as a team. And then, as if I needed any more confirmation of my insignificance in the narrative of this tournament, I landed awkwardly on someone’s foot during a routine drill and tore all three ligaments in my left ankle.
My foot and calf swelled up grotesquely. By the next morning, the bruising had deepened into a swirl of purple, blue and green. I spent the next two games, both losses, sat on the bench with my ankle elevated, and my evenings in the hotel practising how to say ice in Catalan before limping off to reception to ask if they would give me some.
If Wales didn’t win our next game, we would face the humiliating prospect of an 0-4 record and an early exit in the group stages. Desperate to avoid this, I pleaded with our coach to let me play. I promised to be strapped up by the physio, take painkillers, not to push myself unless I was absolutely confident.
The next morning, I limped alongside him to the tournament’s official physiotherapist, provided for teams too underfunded to bring their own. If you’ve never had an injured joint strapped up by a professional, it’s a hard sensation to describe. They began by wrapping my ankle in a firm underlayer, then overlaid it with rigid strips of tape, each piece placed at a calculated angle to lock the joint in place. The sudden, artificial stability was both reassuring and disorienting, like stepping onto solid ground after hours on a boat. Warming up, I felt sick, not from pain, but from the fear that, at any moment, I would look down and see my foot pointing unnaturally in the opposite direction, bent backwards or sideways, as if it no longer belonged to me.There’s something about serious injury that only experience can uncover—it isn’t really about the pain. What lingers, and what is really unsettling, is the fundamental unreality of it: the body and mind straining to recognise and rationalise, something they know instinctively and intellectually to be wrong.
Still, I pushed through the warm-up and played, badly. The game stayed close for a while, but near the end, the other team pulled away in the manner that sometimes happens in close games, when individual willpower starts to falter, that faltering spreads and the whole team collapses. Afterwards, we sat together in the changing room in muffled silence, confronted by the undeniable facts of our mediocrity. Here we were, in the arena in which we were supposed to prove our worth. The game had given us every chance to make our excellence tell, and it didn’t. I had found my level: somewhere just below the FIBA European Championships Division C.
I wonder if a writer can ever really face the terrifying self-measurement forced on every athlete. One of the first things you learn in publishing is that there’s no definitive measure of what’s good. “Nobody knows anything”, as William Goldman once famously said of Hollywood. It’s impossible to predict what will sell in the moment or what will endure. Even book reviewing, the closest literature comes to competitive sport, gets as much wrong as it does right. The best writers emerge over decades, sometimes even centuries.
Novelist and former professional basketball player Benjamin Markovits has written extensively about the perils of sporting and literary competition. His novels couldn’t be further from the tone of Cool Runnings, they are quiet and reflective, full of condensed, almost aphoristic observations on mediocrity, miscommunication and isolation. Often, they centre on not-quite-elite athletes, or what he calls “successful failures”, exploring how “the implacable logic of competition” and “its horrible lack of mercy” can leave people stripped of their sense of themselves, with a hole that their imagined talent once filled.
I first read his books as a young adult. Initially, I was surprised that the two worlds of basketball and literature could intersect at all, that there was someone out there, living in the UK no less, who shared my twin obsessions. It was only years later that I began to consider what unites the two practices more broadly, the way their twin ambitions can “illuminate each other”. Indeed, what Cool Runnings, Markovits’ books, and my own experience writing and playing high-level sport makes clear, is the fundamental difference in how failure is experienced by athletes and writers.
Part of it, I think, comes down to how each activity relates to control. The greatest athletes operate in a state of near-total command, reducing movement and coordination to a kind of objective truth: I will move here, score there, beat you to that spot. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me. It’s easy to make bold claims about your own abilities, to hold on to illusions—but they collapse the moment you come up against someone who’s simply better. That’s the brutal clarity of sport. It’s this same sense of control that makes losing feel so claustrophobic. It isn’t just about being beaten, it’s about having your agency itself called into question. Your capacity to impose change on the world, and on others, suddenly feels flimsy.
Writing, on the other hand, is inherently more socialised, even socialistic. There is no winning inliterature. Someone has to actually read the work for it to mean anything. Eventually your control over it secedes; that’s what publishing is. Where in sport failure is often immediate and absolute, in writing even the terms of victory are unclear: sales? advances? reviews? How do you factor in nepotism or editorial favours, the various layers of mediation between a book’s worth and its reception? The playing fields are never level. Besides, how could you meaningfully compare Thomas Pynchon to Elena Ferrante say, or Cormac McCarthy to Sally Rooney? As Benjamin Markovits puts it, “every writer is playing a slightly different game.”
Back at the tournament, we still had another four days before we were scheduled to fly home, and with little to see or do in Andorra la Vella, we spent most of our time watching the remaining games. In the background—while we’d been quietly losing all our own matches—my interest in Moldova, and in Dimitri Korolov, had been steadily growing. I had decided that there was no way I was going to happily sit and watch some tax-haven city-state filled with millionaires win the tournament. Supporting Moldova felt like a moral imperative.
And it wasn’t just me. The whole Welsh team had developed a quiet disdain for the kind of players that populated the other teams. The tournament hotel had begun to take on the social dynamics of an American high school film. San Marino, in particular, seemed to be a country populated exclusively by the tanned, handsome heirs to various fortunes. Their best player was a shoot-first point guard called Luca Santoro. One evening, by the sofas in the hotel’s games room, he asked me who Wales’s best player was. I told him we were a well-balanced team. He smirked, made some comment about how that didn’t explain why we’d lost every game, then looked me dead in the eye and, unprompted, said:
“I am the best player.”
Unfortunately, he was basically telling the truth. By then, the superiority of Dimitri and Luca over more or less everyone else at the tournament had become undeniable. Fittingly, they would face each other in the final. On the evening of the game, the stadium that had hosted every match, and never reached more than a quarter of its capacity, was suddenly close to full. Thousands had come out to watch: locals, parents, coaches, players from other teams.
At some level, I think I believed that what had happened to me, and to Wales, might somehow be redeemed through Moldova’s success. But every time he looked to have done enough to pull away, Luca Santoro and San Marino would respond, launching a run that pulled them back into contention. More than that, the two players often found themselves switched onto each other defensively, out on an island on the perimeter, in a private contest in which each tried to impose his will and prove his superiority over the other.
At the time I lacked the words to express the intellectual and emotional feeling I had while watching the game. The sense that every time Dimitri moved with the ball, he was not merely an individual representing his side, but for that moment, he was his side. That this fundamental relation between the one and the many, individual and collective, leader and followers, representative and ranks, was somehow structurally imposed on the players, and that it might somehow involve me, as an observer, too.
Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James has since given me a clearer language for what I was witnessing. Sport, he has argued, is constantly compelled to reproduce the fundamental dramas of human life: the things that “characterize all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own”. Just as Dimitri and Luca found themselves carrying the weight of their country’s hopes, James observed that sport allows two individuals to be pitted against each other in a conflict that is both strictly personal and deeply representative of a wider social group. A contest where individual brilliance—however competent or dazzling—is ultimately judged by whether it brings victory or staves off defeat. Just as “the dramatist, the novelist and the choreographer” must strive to make their individual characters symbolic of a larger whole, sport naturally provides those dynamics. To watch Korolov and Santoro was, in James’s words, “the very stuff of human life.”
But I’ve come to think that the urge to frame every contest as allegory—to find in sport a lesson or moral arc—is part of the problem. James’s philosophy is seductive: it makes games feel meaningful. But that meaning is imposed, not discovered. Reconsidering that night at the tournament, a different sports film came to mind, one with a radically different tone to Cool Runnings, but also grounded in real events: Moneyball. It follows the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane as he rebuilds a struggling baseball team using sabermetrics and statistical analysis, rather than traditional scouting instincts. The entire point of the story is to strip sport of magical thinking: to stop scouting players based on gut feelings, charisma, or facial symmetry, and instead use mathematical logic: a player’s on-base percentage, their efficiency, their cost-to-performance ratio. The strategy is correct not because it made for a good story, but because it is economically rational. And yet, the man who implements that strategy, Billy Beane, is himself deeply superstitious. He won’t watch games live. He believes his presence causes comebacks. And when Scott Hatteberg, the player Beane fought to sign based on spreadsheets and sabermetrics, hits a walk-off home run to break the winning streak, it feels like divine confirmation. The system worked. But it also delivered magic.
That’s the dilemma: the Oakland A’s were good because they resisted narrative, but the record was broken in a moment of perfect narrative symmetry. That symmetry seduces us; it treats contingency as destiny, outcome as evidence, coincidence as fate. But the story always arrives after the fact and it just as easily could have happened any other way. And there, in Andorra, there was no such magical script. Heading into the final few minutes, Korolov was close to securing a 50-point triple-double—a feat without literary equivalent, except to call it a kind of masterpiece of performance. But Santoro, with nearly 40 points, had teammates who were contributing in ways Korolov’s weren’t. With 20 seconds left, the game was tied. Whatever happened on the next possession would likely decide the outcome.
As the seconds ticked down, Santoro had the ball at the top of the key, once again facing Korolov. A barely perceptible shift of his shooting hand made Korolov lean in, anticipating a contest. But it was a feint. The sliver of space it created, the disruption in Korolov’s balance, was enough. Santoro drove past him towards the hoop, evading a help defender and, finding himself alone, rolled the ball off the tips of his fingers, where it seemed to hang for a second in the air, before dropping cleanly through the net.
Once we had returned home, I spent the next few months in a kind of mourning. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t play. I had to let my ankle heal. So instead, I read. It was around this time that I first came across Benjamin Markovits’s book Playing Days—his semi-autobiographical novel about a young aspiring basketball player who moves to Germany to play in the lower professional leagues and is forced to grapple with his fading athletic dreams. Where much sports writing still deals in mythic encounters—passion, destiny, fate—Markovits understood that most sport is technical, procedural, and that victories usually come down to small, cumulative competencies. The novel perfectly captures that objective gap. To understand sport, as I had for so long, through the redemptive arcs of American film and TV, was, as Markovits writes, like “applying poetry to chemistry equations.” It just doesn’t ring true.
A few years later, I went to university. Later still, I did an MFA in Creative Writing. Basketball slowly became just a hobby. At the same time, I began to realise writing’s dependence on something as unstable as language meant I could more easily wriggle out of a sense of my own failure. There is no literary equivalent to losing four games in a row and crashing out in the group stages. Indeed, writing poetry and prose is often gratifying exactly because precision is so difficult. Of course, it would be misleading to say that world has no competitive perils—ask anyone who has sat in a high-quality workshop full of ambitious writers if they’ve ever had someone try to make their inadequacy suddenly clear—but mostly, language’s opacity offers a space where contemporaries aren’t rivals but collaborators. Where one person’s success doesn’t diminish your own. Literature, as hard as some try to make it seem so, is not a zero-sum game.
Last week, taking a break from something I was writing, I looked up Dimitri Korolov. He’s still playing professional basketball, now for CS Municipal Târgu Mureș in Romania’s top league. He’ll be thirty in July—probably only a few years from the end of his career. I also looked up Luca Santoro. According to Google, he played college basketball in Florida and now works in finance. His LinkedIn profile picture shows him on a yacht, wearing an expensive-looking watch.
I admit I found it hard not to immediately compare the facts of their lives now to my own, to seek some neatly tied conclusion to whatever shared narrative I had once imagined. That I could claim, if not victory, then at least the moral triumph of Cool Runnings. But by what rubric could I possibly compare myself to them? By the “implacable logic of competition”, only Korolov had carved out a professional career, even if it was a middling one in one of Europe’s minor leagues. It struck me then, that for all writing’s ability to let you wriggle free from failure, the other side of that freedom was its resistance to clear, measurable progress. I had spent hours that day staring at a page, hoping for a poem to take shape, only to make it worse. And yet, at other moments, when I was half asleep on a train or scrolling through my phone on the way to work, the right line would suddenly arrive and crack the whole thing open.
I clicked on Korolov’s Eurobasket profile—a website that tracks professional players across Europe, my own page buried somewhere in its archives—and began to scroll through his box scores, taking note of his season averages over the past decade. From the 18-year-old who reached that Euros final to the veteran he now represented on his Romanian side, through to his peak in the 2019 season just before Covid: 16.2 points per game, 6.2 rebounds, 1.3 assists. The numbers, the way they sat in the spreadsheet like something from a science experiment, pure data, had a clean-edged clarity that I realised was stirring in me a level of emotion that any normal adult would consider absurd. I felt actual tears begin to well in my eyes. There’s something beautiful about how some numbers stay with you. The same way I still knew my stat line from that first game against Moldova: 19 points, 11 rebounds, 4 steals, 3 turnovers. We often talk about the indignity of being reduced to a number. But we rarely speak of the comfort of being counted up. There are few acts in my life where it’s felt like there was a direct relationship between the effort I exerted and what it yielded. For a short while, shooting a basketball was one.
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