Last Sunday morning, I was grateful to live in a time zone where I could watch the USA vs. Canada men’s hockey final live, before I needed to leave for church. I sat with my kids—my 3-month-old in my lap—and watched as the thrilling game reached its climax before 8 a.m. Pacific. Tied at the end of regulation—thanks to some insane saves from goalie Connor Hellebuyck—the sudden-death overtime period commenced. A few nerve-racking minutes in, Jack Hughes seized the moment and took his shot. History. Goosebumps. No algorithm could have scripted this outcome. Not a miracle—but a moment that nevertheless felt transcendent. “Great moments are born from great opportunity,” says Kurt Russell’s version of Herb Brooks in a locker room speech in Miracle, the film about USA men’s hockey’s 1980 gold-medal team. On Sunday, Hughes had a great opportunity and turned it into a great moment. The puck sailed into the net and Team USA secured its first men’s hockey gold in 46 years. I screamed and high-fived my boys. We watched with joy as the American team cleared the bench and the fans went wild. As Hughes draped himself in the American flag, his smile—bloodied and full of gaps, thanks to Sam Bennett’s high stick knocking out three of Hughes’s teeth mere minutes earlier—added to the poetry of the moment. Here was an image Claude couldn’t have conjured up: a snapshot of the grit and the glory, the pain and the pride, the uncontrollable drama of athletic competition—one of the last singularly human spectacles in an age of machines. Are Sports the Last Human Art Form? Why do great sports moments resonate with us and indelibly stick in our memories? Because they capture the vulnerability and unpredictability of what it means to be human. In the dawning AI age, distinctly embodied phenomena will increasingly stand out as displays that can’t be artificially reproduced, even by the most sophisticated LLMs. I expect that as movies, music, and other written works become more and more AI-rendered or AI-enhanced, athletic competitions and live sporting events will become dearer to us as refreshingly unenhanced displays of purely human prowess. Maybe physical sports will become the last human art form. What literature and poetry have been to the humanities up until now, perhaps athletics will be for the humanities in the age of AI: a genre where the pain and glory of human existence is hashed out, not on a canvas or a page but on a field or in an arena. Maybe physical sports will become the last human art form. Even if teams of android robots could one day compete in professional athletic leagues of their own, would we care to watch? I don’t think so. We don’t watch sports primarily for the feats of hard athletic skill on display. We watch them for the human stories behind the skills—the families who made these athletes, their cultures and nations, their personal and patriotic passion, the physical and emotional hurdles they’ve overcome. These athletes aren’t personality-lacking robots programmed and built in factories to be athletically perfect. They’re imperfect humans who put in the work to become as good as they can be. We’re awed because we understand the long hours, focused discipline, and “blood, sweat, and tears” sacrifices these athletes endured to get here. We know what they do isn’t easy, even if they make it seem effortless. We know what they do isn’t easy, even if they make it seem effortless. We also know that central to embodiment is the risk of injury, the limitations of biology, and the reality of mortality—things AI cannot know or model. These are actual, flesh-and-blood, highly breakable human bodies pushing themselves to the limit, flipping through the air on skis or skates, careening down steep slopes at 75 mph or bobsled tracks at 90 mph. This bodily vulnerability is part of what makes athletic competition compelling. It’s Hughes scoring the game-winning goal while still spitting blood from just having three teeth knocked onto the ice. It’s the unforgettable moment of Kerri Strug clinching gold for the USA women’s gymnastics team in 1996 when she landed her second vault despite an injured ankle. But it’s also the horror of knowing that elite skiers like Lindsey Vonn can nearly lose a leg in a horrific accident, or that short-track speed skaters might get a blade to the eye during a race. It’s the thrill of athletes embracing real risk, something AI is programmed to always avoid. Possibility of Failure We also resonate with sports because they’re unpredictable, uncontrollable, and utterly contingent on factors no algorithm could predict. In this way, sports feel like real life. As much as modernity tries to tell us otherwise, our stories are hugely directed by providential factors beyond our control. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way” is simply not correct. Curveballs can and do confront every ambitious high-achiever. We might try to force our own path, but God redirects us at his sovereign will (Prov. 16:9; 19:21). Sports capture this reality in microcosm. We cheer our favorite teams and athletes, hoping to see them victorious. But we know the result might be heartbreak. Some of the hyped stars of Team USA collapsed under pressure at these Winter Games—like “quad god” Ilia Malinin’s eighth-place finish in men’s figure skating. For Canadians watching Sunday’s men’s hockey game, the “what might have been?” is hard to stomach. Every athlete and sports fan experiences the bitterness of losing. But this is precisely what makes sports so thrilling. Nothing is guaranteed. Outcomes are unpredictable. In an excellent recap video of the Winter Games, NBC sports correspondent Mike Tirico said, “The truth is, you can be the best in the world for four years, over 1,400 days, but your career is often defined by what happens that one day. That’s why the Olympics draw us in.” Indeed. You can’t script sports according to statistical probability or data analysis. And if you could, they’d lose their appeal. What resonates with us in life is what defies engineerability, as contemporary German sociologist Hartmut Rosa argues. You can’t manufacture resonance. It’s only possible when you release yourself to be touched or affected—perhaps the word is graced—in ways you didn’t plan or control but receive. In his short book The Uncontrollability of the World, Rosa says, It is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world. An AI-optimized world, I fear, will quickly begin to feel like a “dead world” devoid of true resonance. Yet athletic competition has the potential to keep us grounded in humanity, providing those ever-rarer moments of real resonance. Because even as athletes and coaches certainly apply “optimization” techniques in every way they can, there’s only so much they can control. The weather, sickness, nerves, emotion, and other X factors throw a wrench into the best optimization schemes. But these God-given realities make life dynamic and interesting. Image-Bearing Glory and Honor As a sports fan, I’ve had other moments similar to watching Team USA’s 2026 hockey victory: Watching my Kansas City Chiefs at Super Bowl LIV (2020) come back from a 10-point deficit in the fourth quarter to win their first championship in 50 years Watching the Kansas Jayhawks overcome a 9-point deficit against Memphis in the 2008 men’s basketball national championship, culminating in Mario Chalmers’s “miracle” 3-point shot to tie the game and send it to overtime It’s interesting how often the word “miracle” is used in dramatic sports moments (or other religious language like “immaculate reception” and “hail mary”). The 1980 USA men’s hockey victory over the Soviet Union was dubbed the “miracle on ice,” revisited recently with an excellent Netflix documentary, Miracle: The Boys of ’80. Why do we feel compelled to assign supernatural language to these events? We know these superstar athletes aren’t actually “gods” but rather breakable, mortal beings like us (albeit with more toned muscles). But maybe as they excel, win races, and break records—despite their human limitations—we see something of the imago Dei on display. We’re not God. We’re limited. But we’re also imbued with God-given dignity, image-bearers who are a little less than angels, and crowned with glory and honor (Ps. 8:5). What resonates with us in life is what defies engineerability. As Olympic athletes stand on the medal podium and have gold, silver, or bronze placed on their necks, perhaps we see echoes of this “crowning with glory and honor.” Humans are profoundly flawed and contingent, yes. But we’re capable of beautiful works and inspiring achievements because of how God wired us, because of the common grace he gives. Perhaps pinnacle athletic achievements also appeal to us eschatologically, as we glimpse ever so faintly the future when our fallen nature and broken bodies will give way to redeemed humanity. Sporting achievements are temporal goods, fleeting “highs” that won’t eternally endure. But they’re still good gifts, with values and virtues that will likely become even more vital as the age of AI unfolds.