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Sport has now become one of the most impressive phenomena of modern society. Its biggest organisations, from IOC to FIFA, include a higher number of countries with respect to the UN. The turnover of sporting events, both regional and international, skyrocketed and the biggest countries line up to host such meets as the Olympic Games or the Football World Cup as they can contribute in increasing their GDP. The biggest sporting events have the highest TV ratings in the world. Sport champions are idolized by the crowd and are taken as models by young people.
Yet even those people who agree on the importance of sport and others who are willing to follow it uncritically cannot deny the fact that with its frenetic spectacle and profit-driven logic, as well as the related, periodic explosions of violence, it raises some ethical issues that are equally important as those related to economics and politics. When observing this daily spectacle we increasingly ask ourselves where sports main educational mission has gone.

Panathlon International - an organisation that for over 50 years has been promoting ethical principles in all forms of sport - at its 17th Congress discussed whether the primacy of ethics also applies to sport and sports people. With this aim in mind International President, Enrico Prandi, and the Scientific Committee Chairman, Maurizio Monego, gathered in Stresa (Italy) in May 2010 some of the leading world experts on this subject, including academics like William Morgan (US), Yves Vanden Auweele (Belgium), Lamartine Da Costa (Brazil) and Giuseppe Mari (Italy), who, together with others more directly involved at international level with Panathlon on this issue, i.e. Aldo Aledda, Marila Alvarez, Eliane Borter, Antonio Bramante, Marc Maes and Antonio Spallino, examined this complex issue in depth with no awe.