Last June 15, 2025, during the closing of the jubilee of sports …..Pope Leo XIV said in his homily: “our competitive society, where it seems that only the strong and winners deserve to live, sport also teaches us how to lose. It forces us, in learning the art of losing, to confront one of the deepest truths of our human condition: our fragility, our limitations and our imperfections.

This is important, because it is through the experience of these limits that we open our hearts to hope. Athletes who never make mistakes, who never lose, do not exist. Champions are not perfectly functioning machines, but real men and women, who, when they fall, find the courage to get back on their feet. 

Saint John Paul II hit the mark when he said that Jesus is “the true athlete of God” because he defeated the world not by strength, but by the fidelity of love (cf. Homily at the Mass for the Jubilee of Sportsmen and Sportswomen, 29 October 2000). This love is seen on his service to the marginalized.