Debunking my least favorite motorsport quote

And no, it's not "if you no longer go for the gap..."

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

If you're a fan of motorsport (or a big lover of American literature (or maybe both!)), then you've probably heard this Ernest Hemingway quote. I've spent approximately ten years, and I am not even kidding, viscerally hating on this quote and attempting to articulate why it drives me so nuts.

Today is finally the day. Today is the day I break this quote down and give it the what-for it deserves.

If you're new here — hi! I'm Elizabeth Blackstock, a motorsport historian and journalist with various degrees in words and how to use them. My goal with this Substack is to create a space for the critical engagement that the racing world so lacks.

Let's get back to that Hemingway quote. “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

First and foremost, it's not actually a Hemingway quote. Automotive writer Ken Purdy has taken credit for linking the three aforementioned sports in an article for The Atlantic in 1957, but the full quote is from one of Purdy's fiction pieces titled “Blood Sport,” which was published in the July 27, 1957 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. The quote also sometimes gets linked to Alfonso de Portago, but only because Purdy also wrote about discussing the quote with the Marquess, and because de Portago agreed with the sentiment.

I think it matters less who said it than it does why this quote has become such an obnoxious fixture in racing circles (particularly amongst the folks who wish drivers would go back to being “gladiators,” which is basically just code for “I thought it was cool that multiple people died every year”).

An Appeal to the 7 Types of Conflict

Growing up, I had a teacher who loved to make us identify key themes in the stories we read, which meant we were tasked with identifying which of the seven types of literary conflict the piece used. Was this a “Person vs. Nature” story, or was the problem with society? Were we looking at an internal conflict, or a battle against technology?

Honestly, I've found this framework to be helpful in pretty much all aspects of my life, even outside of literature. When people resonate with a myth, a story, or, in our case, a quote, it's because that quote probably appeals to one of these key conflicts. And this quote has quite a few:

• Person vs. Nature: Mountaineering and bull fighting are both prime examples of man attempting to conquer the brutality and unpredictability of nature. Even motorsport draws in an element of nature, particularly in the past, when tracks were lined with ravines, trees, and other deadly hazards.

• Person vs. Machine: Motorsport is the ultimate representation of man vs. machine; your fight is as much against your car as it is against your competitors.

• Person vs. Self: All three sports mentioned in the quote require its competitors to battle against their own fear to find success.

• Person vs. Person: Motorsport is inherently a competition of men against one another, but even mountaineering and bull fighting have elements of competition against others — being the first to set a record, being the only one to defeat an animal.

• Person vs. Fate: I've lost track of how many racing drivers before the 1980s era admitted to feeling a certain sense of predestination; men like Alberto Ascari spent their lives outrunning superstition in hopes of avoiding what they perceived to be their fates. I don't know the histories of mountaineering or bull fighting as intimately, but I can only imagine these activities also bring about a certain amount of bargaining with an unfeeling universe.

• Person vs. Society: Motor racing, bull fighting, and mountaineering all require a certain level of asociality; to be the best, you have to be comfortable with the fact that you can die at any moment, and that is a very difficult thing for the Average Joe to understand.

With racers, mountaineers, and bull fighters, there's a certain level of exceptionalism. These are not “normal” hobbies that you pick up and drop at a whim; they require you to reckon with existential questions of death and danger, which often includes your willingness to put other living beings at risk. The folks who are content to go with the flow of life aren't the ones who hopped behind the wheel of a several-thousand-pound race car wearing nothing but slacks, a t-shirt, and maybe a cloth cap.

Part of the romance of these sports comes from the fact that you have to assume the competitors have had those difficult conversations with themselves and have decided to continue doing what they're doing, at risk to their lives — and that's fascinating. Even if you yourself never feel the desire to careen around a race track at 230 miles per hour, wouldn't you like to talk to someone who does? Wouldn't you like to know where that feeling comes from? And why you don't have it?

That's the beauty of conflict — and the beauty of Ken Purdy's Hemingway-esque quote. It sets up these three sports as being the only ones worthy of consideration, and it also comes in at the end with a real kicker: All your beloved ball sports are bullshit. If you're a fan of racing, bull fighting, or mountaineering, it allows you to revel in a sense of superiority. If you're not, it probably pisses you off. Either way, the emotions are great enough here that you're going to remember it.

All that is worthy is masculine, and all that is masculine is violent

What do motor racing, mountaineering, and bull fighting have in common? They're all inherently masculine-coded activities, they require some level of violence, and that violence is celebrated.

In both racing and bull fighting, I think the violence is clear, but I understand how my argument might sound a little murky in the case of mountaineering — but hear me out.

Humans have climbed mountains since the dawn of time, but the act of climbing mountains for sport — and discovery — is massively patriarchal. Mountaineering, as a hobby, grew popular in the late 1700s because it was so intimately tied with conquering the natural world. God may have built these unassailable peaks, but He wants his strongest mountaineer to reach the top.

In 1918, mountaineer Hugh Stutfield addressed The Alpine Club by saying that, to outsiders, mountaineering may look like “a rather peculiar pastime,” but those who actually indulge treat it more like a “religion.”

Here, take a big, chunky quote about it:

The true mountaineer is not a mere gymnast, but a man who worships the mountains. . .he demands closer contact with the objects of his passion; but this passion is never otherwise than devout and reverential in its quality. To us the great ranges and the glaciers lying at their feet are sacred things. Our cathedrals are the massive white domes and slender rocky spires thrusting upwards into the blue empyraean. . .We are zealots with an unwritten creed; for a faith to which no Pope has given definition we cheerfully undergo voluntary martyrdoms; and the fervour of our zeal is apt to lead us, as it leads other sectaries, into excesses which at times border on fanaticism

Aside from very obviously coded words like “thrusting,” this deeply reverential attitude toward mountaineering — that mountain climbers are compelled to conquer these great peaks — sounds a whole lot like the colonial attitude of, “Us white folks are compelled to conquer India / China / Africa / the Americas / [insert any other non-European society here].” A lot of folks spent a lot of breath and a lot of ink claiming that, actually, their colonial goals were totally good and normal and sanctioned by the Church, but it was largely just a way to justify a superiority complex over any non-white society.

On its face, mountaineering may not seem violent, at least not against other humans, but the act of conquering land — or, climbing to the peak of Himalayas — is a kind of exploration akin to the “let's just go see what's out there” expeditions that saw Europeans form colonies around the world. You get to your destination and decide that you are clearly the only worthy person to see this place and understand its value, and so you are therefore now its master. Even if other people got to that peak before you did. They just weren't white dudes, so it didn't count.

Bull fighting is obviously violent: It requires a human being fight a large, living animal until one party dies (or is “subdued,” but that's not where Purdy's fictional thrill came from). A man fighting a large animal is arguably the peak of violent masculinity — of proving your power over the natural world by taking down one of nature's thrashing beasts. It wasn't foolish; it was thrilling. And if you didn't understand that thrill, well — there must clearly be something lesser about you.

Michael Palin, a British comedian probably summed up the fascination with bullfighting the best: “I will never feel about it the way they do, and that alone intrigues me.”

And in motorsport, particularly up until the 1980s, death was a common side effect of sitting in the cockpit of a machine loaded with highly flammable fuels. In the early days, the use of seatbelts was highly debated among drivers, because sure, you might be saved from death by not being thrown from your car in an airborne crash — but your car would almost certainly burst into flames when you hit the ground, and who knows if your seatbelt will release. Which would you rather prefer: a blunt-force head injury, or burning to death?

Today we'd call this death drive “toxic masculinity,” but in a world still wracked by global wars and the first hints that imperialism had gone awry, violence, aggression, and even indifferent cruelty were coveted. They were essential survival skills for the generations of men sent to the front lines, who lost their friends and family to gunfire or illness, who returned home with a hard heart and no way to make sense of the brutality. The only way to feel something again? Risk your life.

That mindset is obviously still coveted today — it only takes one look at the staunch defenders of America's second amendment to see that a lot of folks crave an excuse to unload a clip into a living creature, or to check out the variety of uber-religious homesteader social media accounts that want to cultivate land as a violent rejection of our current system. We just have more language to call out that bullshit now.

Good Ol’ Nostalgia

As a motorsport historian, I spend a lot of time talking to the folks who lived through the ultra-dangerous eras of racing, and I spend a lot of time reading long since out-of-print books to understand the perspectives of the folks who died before I could probe their memories. And honestly, the longevity of this faux-Hemingway quote seems mostly tied to nostalgia for an era that's long since gone.

The thing I've noticed is that a lot of contemporary books about historic motorsport are more critical of the seemingly mindless deaths that wiped out so many of the most incredible drivers of the era. It felt senseless to them, because they could see the very obvious faults with the racing, the cars, the tracks. Those writers had gotten to know the drivers, and there was legitimate pain when those drivers died — even if there was still plenty of mythmaking (which I've noticed helps a lot of those white male writers reckon with the pain of loss).

It's more of the historical revisionism that I think keeps this quote alive. When I talk to guys who were big racing fans back in the 1960s and ‘70s, they definitely do look back on that time with rose-colored glasses. They'll acknowledge the tragedy of death, but they'll go on and on about how much better the racing was.

And I think it's just pure nostalgia. Honestly. These guys crave an era where they were young, where life felt ripe with possibility. They could travel to race tracks and stand inches away from cars that they'd only previously seen in black-and-white magazines and sleep in the back of their car and sneak into the pits and snap photos of glamorous World Champions. It felt special, because they weren't inundated with motorsport at all hours of the day. It felt powerful, and meaningful, and beautiful, because their experience of motorsport was a full-blown, all-immersive event that only happened every few months, if they were lucky. And the pain of death was almost always dulled, because those fans weren't watching it happen; they were reading about it after the fact.

And because they'd only gotten to know these drivers and these stories in newspapers and magazines, there was distance.

Technology has made racing safer, more competitive, more innovative. We can run a thousand simulations of a wreck to make sure it never happens in real life. When a driver makes a social media post, we end up with hundreds of articles from motorsport publications breaking down that post, and its implications, plus 200 words of context to make sure Google scans it for SEO. When we watch a race, we have so many angles of the action and can watch a wreck a thousand times and then can tune into an hour of post-race interviews. We have more races in a season than we know what to do with, plus sprint races or non-championship events and qualifying, and there's more than any one person can absorb.

Of course these old guys miss the good ol’ days, back when mystique was a critical element of motorsport. I'm a journalist, and I'm going to be honest: I wish I knew a lot less about these guys. I wish I wasn't standing there in the media scrum after the race demanding a debrief from 17 drivers. I wish I didn't know the names of a driver's pets.

I love history because there's so much I don't know, and that I'll never know. But I also love investigating how those stories get told, how a writer used the information provided about this driver, and how that writer created a story. If that writer is anything like me, they love racing, and they want to make this story beautiful. I love seeing how they do that.

But that doesn't mean motorsport — or bull fighting, or mountaineering — was inherently better back when it was more dangerous. It doesn't even mean that the danger was the primary thing that made those sports interesting. I think we just miss having the freedom to tell our own stories about those death-defying competitors.