I’ve been watching some of the Winter Olympics on TV and marvelling at the way that the top competitors all seem to achieve times which are within a fraction of a second of one another’s. Time and again the commentators point out that the winning margin is four-hundreths of a second or similar.

It’s sometimes a bit baffling to watch all these talented sportspeople who have trained for years, in different countries, to reach the same pinnacle of athletic achievement that their rivals also manage to reach. It feels as though more of a distance should separate the winners from the also-rans. As it is, the also-rans are often within a whisper of the medallists’ times. You feel that fate could so easily have shuffled the results so that three different people would end up on the podium.

It went through my head that people who go to listen to music competitions must feel similarly about the competitors’ achievements. Such talented musicians on such a high level, and all able to master the most difficult pieces with style and confidence! How on earth are the judges to distinguish between them? Surely there can’t be better playing than this?

I guess that in both cases, sport and music, the principal value for the competitors lies in the training. They can see what the top achievers in their field are doing and try to match it. In the process, they have to confront themselves and try to deal with whatever quirks or shortcomings separate them from the leaders. Quite often they manage it, too.

So if you just look at it from a human point of view and don’t worry about who exactly has won a medal, you can see the great benefit of committing to a rigorous training process and fighting your way through to being your best self. To the casual observer, it may look as if the competitors end up being kind of indistinguishable from each other, but perhaps that is not the point.