Why is sport so obsessed with Goats?

Spectator

15 hours ago

It was late at night in rural France and Martin wanted to discuss Goats. And he didn't mean livestock. 'You write about sport,' he said. 'Who is the Greatest of All Time?' I asked if he was talking about my stunning victory in the village boules competition the previous night, but it turned out he was thinking of a certain Serbian tennis player.
'Novak Djokovic is the Goat,' he said, with the certainty that comes from a third bottle of Bourgueil. I conceded that Djokovic's record was a smidgen better than Rafael Nadal's, though some might prefer the artistry of Roger Federer – but didn't Bjorn Borg have an even better winning percentage in the grand slams? This pleased Martin's Swedish wife. And the career records of Serena Williams and Martina Navratilova are right up there.
Martin was unconvinced, so we turned to Goats in other sports. Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi in football, he said, though the shades of Maradona and Pele might say something about that. I offered Jack Nicklaus's record 18 majors in golf and that Don Bradman's Test batting average remains so far above any other cricketer. What about the undefeated thoroughbred Frankel? Can a horse be a Goat?
People have been sorting sheep from goats ever since St Matthew, though in the Gospel the latter receive eternal punishment, probably for being smug. The modern concept began with Muhammad – Ali, that is – who called himself The Greatest when he beat Sonny Liston. In 1992, Ali's wife created Goat Inc to handle his commercial rights.
Until quite recently, however, most people still used 'goat' to mean a duffer. It was possibly short for scapegoat, though may have a connection to the horns sign shown to a cuckold. The acronym-form took off in 2017 when teammates of the American footballer Tom Brady brought five goats to practice, one for each of his Super Bowl wins. The Merriam-Webster dictionary soon added a new definition as the use of Goat to denote excellence proliferated on Twitter.
There were 333,665 goat emoji tweets the day after Brady won his sixth Super Bowl. This led the Wall Street Journal to report that the 20 days with the most Goat tweets (or bleats?) all related to sport: six times about Brady, seven about basketball's LeBron James, once about Williams, Messi, Federer, the snowboarder Shaun White and the baseball player Clayton Kershaw, and twice about Tiger Woods, though he got more goat emojis on the day he was arrested for drink-driving in 2017 than he did for winning the Masters two years later. (No one tweets Goat at bishops or transport secretaries.)
The usage has become ever more prevalent. For the Olympics, the hashtag for the gymnast Simone Biles created an emoji of a goat in a red leotard. In the past month, articles have compared Ronaldo with Messi as football's Goats and James with Michael Jordan as the Goats of basketball. Toto Wolff, head of the Mercedes F1 team, said Lewis Hamilton, who's having a poor season, 'will always be the Goat', while footballer Esme Morgan stated that a note she passed to Lucy Bronze as the Lionesses struggled to beat Sweden at the Euros read 'Save us, Goat'.
A rhinestone Goat on Simone Biles's leotard (Getty Images)
Some, like James, play up to it; others, such as Scottie Scheffler, sensibly call it 'a bit silly'. Scheffler is in red-hot form but, as he pointed out when it was suggested he is golf's Goat, he's still 14 major wins behind Nicklaus and 11 shy of Woods. Recency bias led to claims that the Slovenian cyclist Tadej Pogacar is the Goat after winning a fourth Tour de France with ease – but his 30 stage wins in the three Grand Tours over the past six years don't match Eddy Merckx's 64 from 1967-75. Goat claimants seldom appreciate history; they just go with the herd.
They also ignore dominance in less familiar sports. What about Ed Moses, undefeated in 400m hurdles for nine years, nine months and nine days, or Jahangir Khan, who won 555 consecutive squash matches? Valentina Vezzali took golds in fencing at five Olympics. Steve Redgrave did the same in rowing. As a lover of real tennis, I'd add Rob Fahey, world champion for all but two years from 1994 to 2022, who has won the sport's four grand slam titles 51 times, though he may yet be out-Goated by his wife, Claire, who has 45 slams and last lost to a woman in 2009. When she was 12, she thrashed me in a club match 6-0: Kidd beaten by a Goat kid.
But in the end, I'd suggest, ahistorical, narrow-focused hyperbole gets us nowhere. Far better to appreciate the talent we see right now for what it is than make ludicrous claims on eternity. Never mind greatest of all time, best at the moment is enough.