Game theory. Playing to win means that everyone loses.

During dessert, rude conversation was silenced by the appearance of our hosts’ young daughter. Five years old and insomniac, she had stomped through to the adults to stand on tiptoe and whisper into her mother’s ear that she did not want to go to her pre-school’s athletics day tomorrow.

We were sympathetic. Most of us had disliked the sporting events we had endured during our childhoods. No matter how nurturing and supportive our parents or teachers had been, we had all feared failure, and even as five-year-olds we had a keen sense of which classmates were good at running or throwing and which weren’t. For those children who were not particularly speedy or co-ordinated – the majority – the whole thing was a cattle parade in which well-meaning adults patronised you and told big fat lies. It’s not about winning or losing, they kept saying. OK, we wondered, but then why do the winners get ribbons and everybody else gets a platitude? If sport is not about winning, then why do it? Why not just organise an inter-schools stroll in the sun?

Her mother phoned in some excuse or other the next day, but of course we all knew that bunking her first sports day would not save the child from the path along which almost all middle class South African children are dragged: that decade-long ritual which is officially called “playing” or “participating” in organised sports, and which, for the most part, has very little to do with participation and even less to do with play.

In South Africa, sport for children is as much about adult expectation as about children having healthy fun. And because we are a nation unhealthily obsessed with elite sport, we turn a beam of pure, concentrated ambition on our youngest sportsmen and sportswomen, with retarding results. Middle class South Africans are barely old enough to walk when they first understand how their sporting careers will play out. Either they will be athletic, and will be pushed towards provincial and then national “honours” (South African nirvana), or they will fall out along the way. Once they fall out, they will be expected to become sports watchers, standing adoringly at the sideline, buying stupidly expensive merchandise to prove that they are loyal supporters and therefore Real South Africans.

There is a terrible hollowness to this progression, because it overlooks one of the fundamental requirements of sport: participation. In our unhinged rush to embrace elite sport, we have learned to mock less skilful athletic pastimes. The girls or boys in the fourth hockey or cricket team are seen as losers four times removed from the sunlit uplands of First Team glory. Even when we’re old enough to know better, we unconsciously react with patronising, “ag sweet” pity when we see an elderly amateur hobbling around a field or a tennis court. We don’t realise that we should envy them.

I’m not suggesting that we should do away with elite sport. On the contrary, sport played at the highest level remains a profoundly compelling spectacle to watch. Besides, without it, hundreds of famous international footballers would be unemployable as anything other than crash-test dummies and sandbags. But I would argue that this all-or-nothing view is bad for our society, and especially bad for our middle class, prone, as it is, to ignoring large chunks of humanity at the best of times. I could even imagine that there might be a link between active participation in low-level sport and active citizenship. When all you do is watch international sport, it is inevitable that you might start believing that anything less than total mastery is a waste of effort. This belief could easily inform your life as a citizen, too, as you convince yourself that if you can’t vote in people who will do exactly what you want, there’s no point in being involved in civil society.

The destructive potential of elite sport was never more evident than in the fascinating phenomenon that was the Makana Football Association. Formed by political prisoners on Robben Island in the 1960s, the League’s sophisticated administration and strict adherence to Fifa was intended to give the lie to racist myths about blacks’ inability to organise themselves or be disciplined.

From the outset, the MFA emphasised participation rather than excellence. Elderly prisoners played alongside teenagers, and men with two left feet hacked along next to players with genuine eshibobo skills. But soon the better youngsters wanted more. They wanted to excel, to delight in their youth and brilliance, and so a kind of Dream Team was formed. It was an organic desire, and entirely understandable; but its impact on the solidarity of the prisoners was dramatically destructive. An elite team implied that everyone else were Losers. Eventually the team was disbanded to save the Association. It revealed the surface tension on which participation sits; how, when we play to enjoy each other, we play within ourselves; but when we play to win, we have to discard something of our humanity. No matter what the beer ads tell us, elite sport is not a triumph of the human spirit. It is a focussing, and, by implication, a narrowing of it.

So how do we create a more humane mindset through sport? One answer might be to examine the games we force our children to play. Huge amounts of money and time go into trying to determine whether certain food or parenting techniques are helping or harming children, yet few have ever questioned whether rugby, hockey, netball or cricket are helping to create happy, engaged citizens. Are we sure, for example, that we shouldn’t be offering football instead of rugby? Are we ever going to wonder whether co-ed games might be more beneficial than segregated ones?

One glaring example of the blind spot caused by our focus on feeding elite sport is the game of rounders. Widely regarded as the preserve of naff primary school teachers, it is, in fact, a profoundly egalitarian, nurturing and inclusive game. Where our other favourite national sports demand individual brilliance, rounders is structurally inclusive. Everybody gets a chance to bat, and if you’re a rubbish batter, you only have to suffer the humiliation of three swings and three misses. Even better, you don’t then have to watch a star bat for an hour while you stew in the shame of only having lasted 90 seconds. Nine innings mean nine shots at redemption. And perhaps most important of all, boys and girls can play together, and hopefully un-learn some of the appalling lessons society has taught them about who they are and where their value lies. If nothing else, it teaches girls how to throw, and in so doing allows them to enjoy one of the primal pleasures of our species.

There are other strategies, of course. Keeping parents off the sidelines might be a good start: we don’t allow parents to come into exam venues, to shout aggressive support at their children while yelling “You’re all going to fail!” at the other kids; so why is this allowed on the sports field?

But most of all, we need to find a way of reminding ourselves that it’s okay to play sport badly. Once we’ve mastered that, who knows? Our five-year-olds might want to go to their sports day tomorrow…