If you’re victorious, you get a huge arc. If you’ve just
participated, they’re not going to let you go home empty-handed,
so they give you a small one.
In case it wasn’t clear, that’s a very tiny “participation trophy” version of the Arc de Triomphe.
I think that in some children’s sports these days, everyone goes home with a trophy whether they win or lose because it is not important to win and we don’t want to discourage the non-winners and we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I have heard that sometimes they don’t even keep score. So kids go home with a participation trophy, which may be smaller than a winning or triumphant trophy. This comic is showing the Arc de Participation which is smaller than the Arc de Triomphe.
Isn’t ragging on participation trophies more of a 90s thing? It seems like you really only hear it these days when those of a given political viewpoint are digging pretty deep in the talking points bag. I think it’s been largely supplanted by “Millennials are killing…” In any case, the joke is well past its sell-by date.
There was a pretty good gag about “participation trophies” in Pixar’s “Inside Out” (2015).
I’m with Demetrios, this joke seems rather stale. It may have been prompted by one of the “Millenials are evil” pieces which references how we can’t take the real world because we got participation trophies (and, presumably, took those trophies as seriously as our parents’ generation took theirs). Actually maybe it’s a younger artist who was thinking about how Millenials understood, as children, the difference between the participation trophy and the winners’ one, and came up with this idea, but wasn’t really trying to make a point that people would understand.
Kilby – I saw that film recently, but under strongly non-ideal circumstances (watching it on the plane while travelling solo with a 6-year-old and a 14-month-old), so I have no recollection of the gag.
Whining about “participation trophies” may have started in the 90’s, but there’s still plenty of it in present day.
” It seems like you really only hear it these days when those of a given political viewpoint are digging pretty deep in the talking points bag.”
I agree that this tends to show up as a political complaint, but I think it’s not buried that deep in the bag, and it comes out pretty readily. There might be some interesting results if you looked into whether or not the people complaining have much actual experience with either kids or participation in trophy-awarding activities.
Trophies are a physical manisfestation of accomplishment. People who rag on participation trophies are objecting to the notion that showing up every day, working to achieve a goal, is an accomplishment.
Isn’t the soccer player portrayed Zlatan Ibrahimovic ? He used to work for Paris Saint Germain. He is now with LA club Galaxy, not as prestigious as Manchester United.
“There might be some interesting results if you looked into whether or not the people complaining have much actual experience with either kids or participation in trophy-awarding activities.”
One thing I’ve seen in books but never in real life (but that could be regional/cultural/what activities I participate in.) is an event for little kids where everyone gets a trophy, but they’re posed as actual awards, not just participation ones. Once in a book for adults, where the youngest age group (only the kids who were really too young to compete) had it announced that the judges couldn’t pick a winner, so everyone tied for first. A couple of times in kids books where grade-school aged kids were having a pet show, and every pet won a prize (fluffiest pet, quietest pet, etc). I’m fine with regular participation trophies (I’m not one of the grumpy people who thinks that participating is the minimum), but only when they’re framed as a reward for participating, not like those cases where it’s that everyone wins. I suspect that those were written by people who didn’t really understand participation trophies.
I recall some millennial writing something like: “We never ASKED for ‘participation trophies’! Our parents – the baby boom generation – GAVE them to us to make themselves feel better about having a kid who didn’t win. And then made fun of us for having them!”
I thought it was a good point.
@ Christine – It was a very brief moment, easy to miss: at one point in Imagination Land, everyone gets ribbons and/or medals. Both Joy and Bing Bong happily report having “won first prize”, whereas Sadness moans about getting a “participation award” (and making it sound like it was not the first time).
@ Olivier – That a bit of a stretch to try identifying a specific player just based on a minimalistic outline drawing that doesn’t even include a jersey number. I assume you based it on the ponytail, but I couldn’t find any pictures of him with that hairstyle (I will admit that I didn’t try extremely hard).
Kilby: you’re probably right, but sometimes, one cannot help seeing patterns. White shirt (LA Galaxy home), Adidas soccer shoes, ponytail (there was a row a few years ago with Berlusconi about it), hooked nose, arc de triomphe (PSG). Sometimes, a minimalistic outline drawing is all it takes (e.g. Hitchcock). http://www.forzaroma.info/news-calcio/clamoroso-ibrahimovic-francia-paese-m-non-merita-psg/?refresh_ce-cp
Maybe SDF draws all his/her characters this way, though, which would explain your doubts and expose my foolishness.
[Checking] You’re right and I’m a fool, the cartoon is from November 14th, 2016.
Basic overall agenda neutral (“god, it’s irritating how stupid everyone is these days” isn’t really an agenda) curmudgeons like me who once might have grumbled about the inanity of participation trophies (I never really did but I scoffed a few times) for the most part don’t any more. But the hard core “all you liberal weinees are destroying society” have dug their heels in deep and take it as a gods-truth marker of one of the irrevocable turning points of all that have gone wrong and blather about it all the time.
But what is very common now is to complain about the hard cord heel entrenched grouches who still complain about participation trophies.
Anyway… I thought this was just a silly joke. Not particularly a scathing tirade against participation trophies but just a silly bit of humor about two recognizable concepts. I didn’t think it was stale and liked it.
The soccer player portrayed is an 8-year-old girl.
Stale or not, this one cracked me up. Probably says something about me. Oh, well.
While this is a reference to participation trophies, nothing in connects to the standard “what’s wrong with society today” lament. I think the artist just thought “wouldn’t it be funny if there was a little version of the arc for participation, instead of for triumph,” without intending any broader social message. I didn’t find it particularly funny, but not terrible or stale, either.
Rather than a soccer player, it would be funnier if it were Napoleon presenting the Arc to the Prussian army. (“My men get ze big one.”)
Then (later on) the two armies can trade arcs.
This makes me think of “This Is Spinal Tap” where they ordered at 18-foot copy of Stonehenge for their concert but the one they received was 18 inches.
Participation trophies, though maybe not wide-spread at the time, have been around at least since the 1960s. All players on my 1-10 basketball team got trophies.
What changed (and offended people) wasn’t the introduction of participation trophies. It was the withdrawal of championship trophies.
I think you’re being overly optimistic about how rational people are. I heard all the time about how Millennials got participation trophies, but we still had championship ones. And they weren’t rare.
“we still had championship ones. ”
Athletic leagues and programs are generally upfront about this. They offer recreational league teams, where participation is the focus (usually for smaller children), and they offer competitive league teams, where the focus is on competition.
The main difference is what the coach does with the player(s) who aren’t very good. In participation leagues, they play more, because they need more skills development. In competitive leagues, they don’t play at all, because coach wants to win and puts the best players on the field of play. Sometimes the leagues aren’t well-defined, and you wind up with some coaches playing everyone, and others playing the kids who were already good. That’s why some leagues went to extremes such as not keeping score, not declaring or recording winners of games, and not having champions. The goal of such a league is to get everybody to play. Players will either move from such a league to a competitive league, or drop the sport, as they get older and more involved in the sport.
The same thing tended to show up in interscholastic sports… the varsity programs were competitive, and the junior varsity were for players to participate in games that didn’t “count”, so almost anybody who wanted to play could be on a JV team.
I played rec league fairly exclusively (there was one year I was on the all-star team, but that was a case of them inviting every single girl, and picking a team based on who wanted to go to each tournament.) It was a “balance-the-teams”, coaches were told to give everyone equal play time, level of play, and there was a championship after playoffs each season (single elimination, classic 1st place plays last). At the inter mural level there weren’t championships, but you didn’t get participation medals either. (In elementary school you got “tabs”, little felt badges that they gave for anything you were involved in, but no one could mistake that for a trophy.) By the time I was in my late teens there were often only 4 teams per age group, but the club was newish, and often was forming new age groups just as I reached them, so it’s only partial confirmation of the “players drop the sport” part.
Little kids never got championships (I’m not sure they had participation trophies, but I suspect they did), or scroekeeping, but that was for the really little kids. If the older ones were 5 I’d actually be somewhat surprised.
Okay, I was never good in sports – I even volunteered in the Phys Ed/Music/Art office in high school partially as a way of passing all the related classes I had to take. My parents raised us with the idea that what one does is it’s own reward. (ie. None of us were good in sports, music or art and we did not get rewards for good grades on our report cards.) Which it seems to me is the reverse of participation rewards.
I still tend to think that way now as a result. My parents went crazy making go to my high school and college graduations – I did the work, why bother going? Same with a “good citizenship” award I got when I was graduating high school. Wedding? – our parents and Robert insisted on it and planned it as I kept saying “Can’t we just go get married and then go out to lunch with immediate family?’ Also when Robert and I enter crafts at the Long Island Fair, I am shocked if I win any award; he is disappointed if he does not get first prize. (I still have my free tickets to the Fair whether I win or lose and at this point we are helping out as volunteers in so many ways and they have a lack of people entering items, so I like to enter just to help out a bit more.
Comics I Don't Understand 
If you’re victorious, you get a huge arc. If you’ve just
participated, they’re not going to let you go home empty-handed,
so they give you a small one.
In case it wasn’t clear, that’s a very tiny “participation trophy” version of the Arc de Triomphe.
I think that in some children’s sports these days, everyone goes home with a trophy whether they win or lose because it is not important to win and we don’t want to discourage the non-winners and we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. I have heard that sometimes they don’t even keep score. So kids go home with a participation trophy, which may be smaller than a winning or triumphant trophy. This comic is showing the Arc de Participation which is smaller than the Arc de Triomphe.
Isn’t ragging on participation trophies more of a 90s thing? It seems like you really only hear it these days when those of a given political viewpoint are digging pretty deep in the talking points bag. I think it’s been largely supplanted by “Millennials are killing…” In any case, the joke is well past its sell-by date.
There was a pretty good gag about “participation trophies” in Pixar’s “Inside Out” (2015).
I’m with Demetrios, this joke seems rather stale. It may have been prompted by one of the “Millenials are evil” pieces which references how we can’t take the real world because we got participation trophies (and, presumably, took those trophies as seriously as our parents’ generation took theirs). Actually maybe it’s a younger artist who was thinking about how Millenials understood, as children, the difference between the participation trophy and the winners’ one, and came up with this idea, but wasn’t really trying to make a point that people would understand.
Kilby – I saw that film recently, but under strongly non-ideal circumstances (watching it on the plane while travelling solo with a 6-year-old and a 14-month-old), so I have no recollection of the gag.
Whining about “participation trophies” may have started in the 90’s, but there’s still plenty of it in present day.
” It seems like you really only hear it these days when those of a given political viewpoint are digging pretty deep in the talking points bag.”
I agree that this tends to show up as a political complaint, but I think it’s not buried that deep in the bag, and it comes out pretty readily. There might be some interesting results if you looked into whether or not the people complaining have much actual experience with either kids or participation in trophy-awarding activities.
Trophies are a physical manisfestation of accomplishment. People who rag on participation trophies are objecting to the notion that showing up every day, working to achieve a goal, is an accomplishment.
Isn’t the soccer player portrayed Zlatan Ibrahimovic ? He used to work for Paris Saint Germain. He is now with LA club Galaxy, not as prestigious as Manchester United.
“There might be some interesting results if you looked into whether or not the people complaining have much actual experience with either kids or participation in trophy-awarding activities.”
One thing I’ve seen in books but never in real life (but that could be regional/cultural/what activities I participate in.) is an event for little kids where everyone gets a trophy, but they’re posed as actual awards, not just participation ones. Once in a book for adults, where the youngest age group (only the kids who were really too young to compete) had it announced that the judges couldn’t pick a winner, so everyone tied for first. A couple of times in kids books where grade-school aged kids were having a pet show, and every pet won a prize (fluffiest pet, quietest pet, etc). I’m fine with regular participation trophies (I’m not one of the grumpy people who thinks that participating is the minimum), but only when they’re framed as a reward for participating, not like those cases where it’s that everyone wins. I suspect that those were written by people who didn’t really understand participation trophies.
I recall some millennial writing something like: “We never ASKED for ‘participation trophies’! Our parents – the baby boom generation – GAVE them to us to make themselves feel better about having a kid who didn’t win. And then made fun of us for having them!”
I thought it was a good point.
@ Christine – It was a very brief moment, easy to miss: at one point in Imagination Land, everyone gets ribbons and/or medals. Both Joy and Bing Bong happily report having “won first prize”, whereas Sadness moans about getting a “participation award” (and making it sound like it was not the first time).
@ Olivier – That a bit of a stretch to try identifying a specific player just based on a minimalistic outline drawing that doesn’t even include a jersey number. I assume you based it on the ponytail, but I couldn’t find any pictures of him with that hairstyle (I will admit that I didn’t try extremely hard).
Kilby: you’re probably right, but sometimes, one cannot help seeing patterns. White shirt (LA Galaxy home), Adidas soccer shoes, ponytail (there was a row a few years ago with Berlusconi about it), hooked nose, arc de triomphe (PSG). Sometimes, a minimalistic outline drawing is all it takes (e.g. Hitchcock).
http://www.forzaroma.info/news-calcio/clamoroso-ibrahimovic-francia-paese-m-non-merita-psg/?refresh_ce-cp
Maybe SDF draws all his/her characters this way, though, which would explain your doubts and expose my foolishness.
[Checking] You’re right and I’m a fool, the cartoon is from November 14th, 2016.
Basic overall agenda neutral (“god, it’s irritating how stupid everyone is these days” isn’t really an agenda) curmudgeons like me who once might have grumbled about the inanity of participation trophies (I never really did but I scoffed a few times) for the most part don’t any more. But the hard core “all you liberal weinees are destroying society” have dug their heels in deep and take it as a gods-truth marker of one of the irrevocable turning points of all that have gone wrong and blather about it all the time.
But what is very common now is to complain about the hard cord heel entrenched grouches who still complain about participation trophies.
Anyway… I thought this was just a silly joke. Not particularly a scathing tirade against participation trophies but just a silly bit of humor about two recognizable concepts. I didn’t think it was stale and liked it.
The soccer player portrayed is an 8-year-old girl.
Stale or not, this one cracked me up. Probably says something about me. Oh, well.
While this is a reference to participation trophies, nothing in connects to the standard “what’s wrong with society today” lament. I think the artist just thought “wouldn’t it be funny if there was a little version of the arc for participation, instead of for triumph,” without intending any broader social message. I didn’t find it particularly funny, but not terrible or stale, either.
Rather than a soccer player, it would be funnier if it were Napoleon presenting the Arc to the Prussian army. (“My men get ze big one.”)
Then (later on) the two armies can trade arcs.
This makes me think of “This Is Spinal Tap” where they ordered at 18-foot copy of Stonehenge for their concert but the one they received was 18 inches.
Participation trophies, though maybe not wide-spread at the time, have been around at least since the 1960s. All players on my 1-10 basketball team got trophies.
What changed (and offended people) wasn’t the introduction of participation trophies. It was the withdrawal of championship trophies.
I think you’re being overly optimistic about how rational people are. I heard all the time about how Millennials got participation trophies, but we still had championship ones. And they weren’t rare.
“we still had championship ones. ”
Athletic leagues and programs are generally upfront about this. They offer recreational league teams, where participation is the focus (usually for smaller children), and they offer competitive league teams, where the focus is on competition.
The main difference is what the coach does with the player(s) who aren’t very good. In participation leagues, they play more, because they need more skills development. In competitive leagues, they don’t play at all, because coach wants to win and puts the best players on the field of play. Sometimes the leagues aren’t well-defined, and you wind up with some coaches playing everyone, and others playing the kids who were already good. That’s why some leagues went to extremes such as not keeping score, not declaring or recording winners of games, and not having champions. The goal of such a league is to get everybody to play. Players will either move from such a league to a competitive league, or drop the sport, as they get older and more involved in the sport.
The same thing tended to show up in interscholastic sports… the varsity programs were competitive, and the junior varsity were for players to participate in games that didn’t “count”, so almost anybody who wanted to play could be on a JV team.
I played rec league fairly exclusively (there was one year I was on the all-star team, but that was a case of them inviting every single girl, and picking a team based on who wanted to go to each tournament.) It was a “balance-the-teams”, coaches were told to give everyone equal play time, level of play, and there was a championship after playoffs each season (single elimination, classic 1st place plays last). At the inter mural level there weren’t championships, but you didn’t get participation medals either. (In elementary school you got “tabs”, little felt badges that they gave for anything you were involved in, but no one could mistake that for a trophy.) By the time I was in my late teens there were often only 4 teams per age group, but the club was newish, and often was forming new age groups just as I reached them, so it’s only partial confirmation of the “players drop the sport” part.
Little kids never got championships (I’m not sure they had participation trophies, but I suspect they did), or scroekeeping, but that was for the really little kids. If the older ones were 5 I’d actually be somewhat surprised.
Okay, I was never good in sports – I even volunteered in the Phys Ed/Music/Art office in high school partially as a way of passing all the related classes I had to take. My parents raised us with the idea that what one does is it’s own reward. (ie. None of us were good in sports, music or art and we did not get rewards for good grades on our report cards.) Which it seems to me is the reverse of participation rewards.
I still tend to think that way now as a result. My parents went crazy making go to my high school and college graduations – I did the work, why bother going? Same with a “good citizenship” award I got when I was graduating high school. Wedding? – our parents and Robert insisted on it and planned it as I kept saying “Can’t we just go get married and then go out to lunch with immediate family?’ Also when Robert and I enter crafts at the Long Island Fair, I am shocked if I win any award; he is disappointed if he does not get first prize. (I still have my free tickets to the Fair whether I win or lose and at this point we are helping out as volunteers in so many ways and they have a lack of people entering items, so I like to enter just to help out a bit more.
Here’s another take on “participation trophies” from Big Nate.
P.S. Sorry, folk, that link is defective, this one should lead to Big Nate’s trophy.