The word invictus came to our language as undefeated . This adjective is used to describe one or that thing that was never defeated .
For example: “The team from the capital finished the tournament undefeated, with twelve wins and five draws,” “I never thought we could become undefeated champions , but the results have exceeded my expectations,” “The president remains undefeated: he participated in four electoral processes and in all of them he was the candidate with the most votes.”
Take the case of the French soccer team in the 2018 Russia World Cup . This team played the first round as a member of Group C , achieving two wins (against Australia and Peru ) and a draw (against Denmark ). They then defeated Argentina in the round of 16, Uruguay in the quarterfinals, Belgium in the semifinal and Croatia in the final. In this way, he completed the World Cup by playing seven games, with a balance of six wins and one draw: that is, he became undefeated champion .
In football and other sports , meanwhile, there is also the notion of an invincible fence . This is what is called the fact of keeping the goal (the goal) clean, without conceding goals. If Japan beats Indonesia 3-0 , the Japanese goalkeeper will have managed to keep the score unbeaten.
An undefeated boxer , finally, is one who does not know defeat . The American Floyd Mayweather Jr. , to cite one case, is a boxer who achieved the feat of finishing his professional career undefeated: he fought fifty times and won fifty wins, twenty-seven of them by knockout.
As we can see from the previous examples, any title or recognition that has the term undefeated in its name is highly coveted, since it indicates the absence of failures, absolute victory or, at most, with some draw. This is close to the meaning of an impeccable career , although this expression is also used in other areas.
An impeccable career lacks "stains", scandals that have called the person's reputation into question. On the other hand, the concept of undefeated refers to the existence of certain competitions in which the person has faced and has always overcome without being defeated. Of course, this does not mean that a career with certain failures is negative or that it was not worth the effort.
Precisely, the big problem with terms like undefeated or perfect is that they generate immense pressure on students and professionals to reach that almost divine state in which errors do not exist. In practice, as we pointed out above, even an undefeated champion may have ended one or more matches with a draw, so he is not "perfect."
In fact, the fact that an athlete has not known defeat in his entire career does not mean that no one can beat him, but rather that he has had the combination of talent, skill and luck necessary for this not to happen in any of the championships. And this leads us to think about the risk involved in pursuing one of these titles , especially if the individual does not achieve it.
In the field of sport and especially in disciplines that are based on competitions, such as figure skating and swimming, the search for perfection is very common, and in this way many children and adolescents ignore their own needs. of their age to go after a goal that: if they do not achieve it, it will become a failure that is impossible to sustain, given the enormous effort put into it; If they succeed, no one will give them back for the years they dedicated exclusively to it.