If sport is reduced to the cult of the human body, forgetting the primacy of the spirit or if it were to hinder your moral and intellectual development, or result in your serving less than noble aims, then it would lose its true significance and, in the long run, it would become even harmful to your healthy and full growth as human persons. (Pope John Paul II, 2 September 1987)

Renowned for his celebration of sport, the late Pope John Paul II’s words to the athletes of the 1987 Athletics World Championships in Rome warn of the peril to sport and its people by reducing sport to the veneration of human athletic performance. Forewarned is harm both to the integrity of sport itself and the wellbeing its people. Such harm to individuals’ spirit, morality, mind, purpose, significance, and dignity is of deep concern to sports chaplains and others.

My presentation considers the applicability of moral injury to elite sport and to sport’s wellbeing and integrity discourse. Elite sport hides a frontline of human suffering where moral complexity and trauma intersect. In the face of mounting wellbeing and integrity problems faced within elite sport, for example the sexual abuse of athletes, sports’ wellbeing and integrity literature is calling for a multidisciplinary response that considers the moral and ethical frameworks within elite sports’ institutions. Moral injury presents as a nascent and timely response.

I argue that moral injury is applicable to elite sport though contextually contingent. As has been summarised in the military context for potentially morally injurious events there is often the taking of life, whereas in the medical context it is in the failure to save life. I posit that in elite sport the context for potentially morally injurious events is in the failure of the quest.