SF4Sport — a short film, set in 2055

§ 1An eight-year-old girl walks through a sports museum in 2055. The football is in one vitrine. A tennis racket sits in another. One vitrine is empty — the marathon used to live there. She asks her teacher: "What did matter?" The teacher pauses. "I think… what mattered was that they tried."

§ 2The empty vitrine is deliberate. A ball can be put behind glass. A racket can be put behind glass. The act of trying — turning up at the line, finding a limit, falling, getting up, going again — cannot be objectified, so the stand is left bare. That is the poetic centre of the film. Around it, the rest of the museum is a sketch of a future where robots have already broken the records and an AI referee runs the matches; a human marathon, in that world, looks slow and strange.

§ 3SF4Sport — Strategic Foresight for Sport, an Erasmus+ research project — asks how sport will transform over the next five to ten years under AI, automation and performance optimisation. The film carries that question into a scene without taking sides. It does not say AI ruins sport. It does not say robots are bad. It offers a future and invites the viewer to think. The question, we have come to believe, is not technological. It is cultural.

§ 4The closing card answers the only question that matters: we decide. Sport in 2055 will be whatever we shape it into. If trying — the act itself — is worth a vitrine, then the work of protecting that vitrine begins now, not in 2055. The film is short, the argument is small, and the implication is large.