Sport: A Language We All Speak

A grass soccer field with covered stands in the mountain town of Librazhd, Albania, houses and hills behind.

Issue #7

Last summer I ran across Europe, from the Atlantic coast in Portugal to Istanbul, twelve countries in ninety-nine days. Six of them are in the World Cup that’s gripping the world as I write: Portugal, Spain, France, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Turkey, where I finished.

Anyone who has spent time in Europe knows that soccer doesn’t need a World Cup to be alive there. Every country I crossed had leagues stacked into deep divisions, kids everywhere chasing a ball and a dream. 

Albania missed out, and yet Albania is where a group of children pulled me into a game, kicking a ball around a plaza in the mountain town of Librazhd. No shared language, no introductions, just a ball and the rules everyone on earth seems to know from birth. We understood each other completely, all smiles and laughter, without a word.

Librazhd, moments before the kids pulled me in to kick a ball around, Jax at my side.

For a long time I put these welcomes down to luck. 

I remember running through the mountains of Montenegro, sweaty and thirsty, when I stopped at a roadside spring where locals were filling water bottles. They waved me to the front, an athlete in need. 

A stone roadside fountain and water trough beside a dry-stone wall in rural Montenegro.

I felt fortunate, as always, landing among good, kind people. 

Now, I think it didn’t just boil down to luck. 

Sport is a common language, one we all speak but were never taught. And a runner passing through is, wordlessly, speaking that language. He’s an outsider, a foreigner, and yet reflexively, he puts people at ease before a single word is exchanged. The running shoes, the shorts, the hat, the sweat and grime, all make a stranger a little less strange, because he’s recognized as doing something he loves, a dream worth pursuing. 

A friend from England, a huge soccer fan – football, she insists! — once described watching her beloved Arsenal Football Club as a near-religious experience. Whether in front of the TV, or live in the stadium, hands are clasped in prayer during the games, begging for miracles. Fans join together, chanting what amounts to devotional hymns, faces upturned to the altar where the glory happens. No matter where you are, or where you’re from, for 90 minutes, all the nodes are connected. They are one, united in sharing a collective joy or agony.

I love this ritual and tradition, the community it provides. It also fits with what I found on the road. That, just like the World Cup going on right now, my chosen sport — running — also allows me to connect with people from every nation and for us to meet as equals. The ball, the pitch, the road, my feet pounding — they’re all versions of the same thing. 

The world loves nothing more than to find ways to divide us, and collective moments of any kind are becoming increasingly infrequent. 

So, what I felt at that watering hole in Montenegro, before I had words for it, suddenly feels profound. Those kind people saw a stranger in dire need of water and allowed him to be waved to the front of the line. There were no partitions at the roadside spring, just one, solid human mass.

For a fleeting few moments, an almost un-unifiable world felt united.

Hope to see you on the road,

David.

P.S. Happy to report Jax is back at my side, 60 miles together last week.