"We Are the Champions" and GP?

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by aaeamdar

Karthik,

You seem to have missed the fact that other significant parts of North American sports (and, well, almost everywhere else) include: the idea that winning is everything and acting in an unsportsmanlike manner towards your opponents and getting away with it/applauded for it. I would like to think, cheesy as it may sound, that we're all winners at first, and if we all recognized this song as applying to all the teams who built a robot, then really my entire argument collapses. But we all know that that's not the meaning of the song.

I'm glad that you feel recognized when this song plays. However, it's frankly unreasonable for the recognition of winning teams to be more important then (broken record sound) our most important ideals. If recognition has to take a back seat to respecting the entire idea of FIRST, then that's the way it needs to be.

You seemed to miss the fact that it's still a competition. If you take the competition out of FIRST, you are left with very little, and we've suddenly lost the source of inspiration, and the medium to achieving the goals of FIRST.

Perhaps we should stop giving out trophies and medals to the winning teams as well. Everyone should be satisfied with their bronze participation medals. After all, we're all winners.

If we come to a point where the celebration of the winners demeans the losing teams, then yes, we need to cut back. But in FIRST, we're not even close to being at that point. Frankly, I don't think we do enough to celebrate the teams that perform the best on the field. In my opinion this is one of the bigger problems in FIRST. It's almost as if people are ashamed to be competitive in this program. That we're so focussed on keeping everyone happy, that we've lost site of the competition.

Yes, there's much more to FIRST than winning. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with celebrating the winners.