Overdue

Sport is usually relentless in imposing defeat on someone. A boxer lying on the ground, semi-conscious, bruised, who has already been counted ten, has to accept his situation. Someone may later claim a trap. George Foreman said he had been drugged in Zaire; Meldrick Taylor that the fight had been unfairly stopped with two seconds left; Jack Dempsey, who the referee had counted very slowly when he knocked out Tunney, thus giving him the opportunity to get up.

In football, not to mention. The defeats are very clear when the referee whistles. But the defeated looks for an explanation beyond the sum of the goals. That it wasn't a penalty, that it was offside, that the expulsion was not justified, that the referee compensated for a lot of time...

In the world of war there is no regulation as clear as in sports. There are no divisions. A heavyweight can fight against a light flyweight. There is no agreed time. Beyond the extra innings or reaching the series of penalties, we have hundred-year wars.

I'm going to the battle of Marathon. In a few hours the Athenians defeated an army with twelve times as many soldiers. The Persians flee. They are looking for a second opportunity to disembark. Not finding it, they leave for their land. Historians explain it in various ways, and for lovers of freedom, this battle is a great triumph; But for the Persians, wouldn't there be a taste that more could have been done? that defeat was meekly accepted?

Aeschylus tells us of his painful return home.

The passages of Mexican history in 1848 are also painful. We remember the sacrifice of the Children Heroes, but we are certainly commemorating a defeat. At the time, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano wrote:

In this campaign, the incompetence of the former generals who came out of the Iturbidist nucleus of 1821 was revealed, more than ever, their lack of energy and courage, which they only knew how to use in internal wars, when they only had to fight the armies. improvised in the mutiny or recruited in the farm fields, but also the indifference and lack of patriotism of the other so-called privileged classes, of what constituted the aristocracy in favor of centralism, who did not know how to sacrifice their interests for the sake of the homeland