Winning cannot be everything, cannot be the only thing. Words of Gerald Davies, from the inaugural IRB lecture he gave this week on the Lions and the spirit of the game. Well said, Gerald — but hang on a minute. You never told us what else sport is about.

I haven’t always got every single thing that Gerald holds dear — the Barbarians, the Lions, male-bonding, Wales — but he’s always good to listen to, and as a man who once had cheetah’s paws, who managed the last Lions tour, and who writes for this newspaper, he’s a man who commands respect and affection.

But all the same, Gerald — what is sport all about, if it’s not all about winning? Let’s not settle for some non-specific moral agenda. Let’s try and tie the damn thing down, or at least make a start. So here we are: ten things that sport is all about, not counting winning. I shall try to make this equally relevant for both spectators and participants, and I shall leave out money and physical fitness, both of which seem to me to be bonuses rather than prime functions of sport. So here we go.

1. Losing This is one of sport’s prime experiences. The terrible, dreary, passionate, desperate feeling of defeat: the certainty that you were not good enough, the search for excuses accompanied by the inner certainty that there aren’t any — because this is sport. You have to come to terms with your own fallibility, if you like, your own mortality. You have to deal with defeat and then move on. You can adjust to the truths that defeat reveals, or blind yourself to them. Either way, losing remains the quintessential experience in sport. Without losers, there is no sport.

2. Drawing Apologies to American readers, who are not draw-literate, and are therefore unable to understand the sweet ambiguities of the draw. But the rest of us can savour the late goal with which you salvage a result after 90 minutes of mad defending, or the last-wicket stand in which you bat out time for the sheer joy of depriving your opponents of the prize. England’s losing draw with Australia at Cardiff this year was a treasure. At other times, the situation is reversed, and you are forced to try to understand why deserving to win isn’t the same as winning.

3. Companionship Sport is a great sharing thing, and a lasting thing. When two or three are gathered together in the name of Tewin Irregulars, there is always a great atavistic bond to enjoy. It is the same when I am in touch with horsey friends I have competed against. Sport is made doubly vivid by its sharing: the banter I have with my father about cricket and rugby has lasted us for years. Sport comes into its own when travelling: there is always a conversation to be had. The other week, I found myself in Delhi — and therefore in the middle of a glorious, rambling, beery cricketing debate. Without companionship, sport would not exist.

4. Community When a great event takes place, everybody talks about it, everybody shares it. When England play in the World Cup, everybody you meet seems to be involved, and desirous of talking about it. During the Olympic Games, an exceptional performance — Usain Bolt — ensures that everybody has a view. There is a sense of being caught in great events, great but trivial events that exist solely for our pleasure, and that the experience is the richer for being shared by so many.

5. Drama Sport regularly plays out great dramas in front of us: occasions that owe their vividness to the brutal revelation of personalities, the way that sporting occasions cannot help but put certain kinds of strength and weakness in high relief. The high stresses of sport might have been designed to bring out exceptional aspects of personality, things that the performers themselves were scarcely aware they possessed.

6. Excellence Sport is not only about the search for excellence. It is also, sometimes — though rarely, rarely — about its attainment. There are times when sport seems to go beyond competition, and becomes a strange search for a grail of personal or corporate excellence. Ayrton Senna talked about how “I want to beat myself”. Usain Bolt was happy with mere victory at the Olympic Games and danced to the line in the 100 metres. At the World Championships this year, he ran for something more, and did so in 9.58sec.

7. Beauty Sport is often beautiful. There is an aesthetic dimension to all sports, shown by goal-of-the-month “competitions”. In football, victory has a double value if it is also beautiful. Cricketers talk about Denis Compton’s cover drive, rugby people talk abut such things as — well, a Gerald Davies try. All the horse sports are beautiful. Track and field, with bodies perfectly honed for various tasks, is beautiful. Sport is also full of great body shapes, great patterns of movement in team games. The flight of a ball — a six, a Brazilian free kick, a long-range penalty, even a golf shot — touches people’s hearts. You can be as hard-nosed as you like about sport, but you can’t stop it being beautiful.

8. Transcendent moments There are times in sport, sometimes almost imperceptibly brief ones, when a player will do something utterly stunning, something of startling perfection, finding something that is apparently far beyond the normal capacity of that performer. You can find it in Shane Warne and the Gatting ball, in Beckham’s free kick against Greece, in Jonny’s dropped goal: moments when a player is utterly, perfectly inspired. It happens at every level of every game — everyone who has ever played any sport can remember moments of stepping beyond normal limitations, if only for a fleeting instant. These moments light up sport with something that looks and often feels like magic.

9. Fear Without fear there is no sport. You can read that in the fraught anticipation on the faces in the tunnel before a big match. I experienced it in the form of rather bad peritonitis before riding in cross-country competitions. Fear of losing, fear of winning, fear of taking part, fear of making a fool of yourself, fear of hurting yourself, fear of letting people down, fear of not finding your absolute best. Fear gives savour to sport: there is vicarious fear as the runners get down on their blocks, there is shared fear when England’s next penalty shoot-out begins. Sport’s history is written in terror by the million heroes who vomited before the start and then went on to win.

10. Uncertainty Above all other forms of active involvement or passive entertainment, sport has uncertainty. You don’t know what happens next. That’s the point. You might win, you might lose, you might draw. This might be the finest game you have ever watched. This two-year-old racehorse might be the greatest that ever drew breath. Or it might be disaster, personal humiliation, shame and agony. Sport tests, sport tries, sport judges, and you don’t know how it will turn out. Nobody knows: but everybody soon will.