Assessing the Ethical Dimension of the Athlete in Competition:
Our CIFP Council Member Cheche Vidal has created a six-article series as the result of systematizing and exploring how AI can assist humans in the evaluation of ethical excellence in athletic performances at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games — as part of the CIFP/IOC Fair Play Award process. The series will also be published weekly on the International Fair Play website. The first of the six articles is titled: “The Character of Champions: Ilia Malinin, Virtuosity Beyond Gold.”
Sport has been my constant path for as long as I can remember. I took my first steps practicing multiple disciplines, always alongside an academic formation that my parents knew how to help me make inseparable from sport, until football (soccer) became my life: I reached the top of the system as an Olympic and professional player, devoted to the pursuit of the physical and mental excellence that defines a competitor, aware of the ethical dimension as a third form of excellence, yet embracing it then as something implicit.
Later, already in the role of official in the most demanding arenas of global sport, from the World Cup to the digital transformation of the game through the creation of FIFA.com, I discovered that sport could also be lived in a fourth dimension: the intellectual.
Throughout each of these stages, the ethical dimension was always present, silent and taken for granted. It was the development of Dribbli, the research for my book Fair Competition and, above all, the assumption of my responsibility as a Council Member of the Fair Play International Committee (CIFP), that finally brought it to the center, as intellectual challenge and purpose.
This new role presented me, for the first time, with the task of analyzing athletic performances beyond their technical or tactical brilliance, focusing instead on their ethical excellence, as part of the CIFP’s collaboration with the IOC to recognize the spirit of Fair Play at the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games. It was my first major event in this capacity, and I decided to approach it as something more than a duty: I wanted to record the process in order to understand it better, to attempt to systematize it, and to explore how artificial intelligence might amplify it in the future. The result was one of the most intellectually enriching experiences of my life in sport, and this series is my way of sharing it.
The CIFP, the Fair Play Award and the Intellectual Challenge
Founded in 1963 with the participation of UNESCO, FIFA, the IOC and other global sporting institutions, the CIFP has served for more than sixty years as the guardian of ethics in world sport. Today, it runs a program with the IOC in which, at each Olympic edition, its experts analyze performances, identify candidates and submit finalists to the IOC platform, where the global public chooses the winner: a conversation between specialized judgment and collective sensibility.
As this was my first experience in this role, I decided to embrace it as an intellectual challenge. I set out to build an analytically sound and as rigorous as possible framework to systematize the measurement and comparison of ethical performances in competition. The result was a document titled “Analytical Framework for the Evaluation of Ethical Excellence in Sport”, which organizes the analysis across three levels: the extraordinary nature of the behavioral act, the agonistic context of virtuous competitiveness, and systemic excellence — articulated through thirteen evaluation variables, and grounded in the philosophy of Greek aretê, the normative theory of Sigmund Loland, and the arguments of my book Fair Competition.
Artificial Intelligence as a Tool
This conceptual and philosophical framework also carries a prospective dimension: its potential as a structure for training AI agents capable of assisting the human judge in evaluating ethical performances in sport. The idea is to use AI to automate the identification of candidates, the measurement of ethical variables, pattern recognition, and the generation of initial analyses. What it cannot do is judge: AI can measure. Only human consciousness can judge.
This horizon is not only technological, but also institutional. In parallel, the CIFP has initiated the creation of an Academic Committee composed of recognized specialists in sports philosophy and related disciplines, with the objective of consolidating the theoretical framework and refining the processes of ethical measurement and classification, not only for the great events of world sport, but as a tool in service of grassroots sport, where this ethical dimension is more necessary than ever.
The Series: Six Cases, One Question
With the philosophical framework as context, and with the assistance of artificial intelligence, in this case, Claude by Anthropic, I proceeded to test the model by identifying and evaluating the most relevant performances of the Winter Olympic Games from the very first week of competition. The quality and depth of the analyses convinced me of the need to document these findings: the result is five cases, each with its evaluation sheet and illustrated by a descriptive article that brings the analyzed performance to life. I also include an additional article on a case that proved to be an extraordinary demonstration of the effect of technology on athletic behavior.
Each article illuminates a distinct dimension of ethical excellence in competition. Together they form this series, which I will publish week by week in Dribbli Ethosport, combining philosophical rigor with real cases, in the hope of provoking reflection and stimulating debate in a field of sport that has never been more relevant. These are the articles, and their respective case evaluation reports, that will appear one by one:
1- Ilia Malinin (USA): his embrace of the gold medalist after finishing off the podium embodies the purest virtue of a champion. Winner of the CIFP/IOC Fair Play Award of these Games.
2- Bruna Moura (Brazil): a cross-country skier whose presence on the Olympic start line is the result of heart surgery, a car accident, and an unbreakable determination. Competing as victory in itself.
3- Brignone, Hector and Stjernesund (Italy, Sweden, Norway): the women’s giant slalom as a stage for virtuosity in victory and defeat: excellence that elevates itself mutually.
4- Swedish women’s cross-country ski team: collective resilience in the face of adversity, competing through circumstances rather than against them.
5- Norway: not an athlete, but a system. How the institutional architecture of a country can be an expression of Fair Competition and a structural generator of competitive virtue.
6- Technology and Fair Play: a complementary article: the analysis of a curling match between Canada and Sweden reveals how technology amplifies not only technical detail, but character. The tension between external measurement and inner conscience.
Source: https://substack.com/@dribbliethosport
