There are many situations where competition involves a mixture of outdoing and undoing.  Most sports are in this category.

Outdoing is typically expressed by putting points on the scoreboard.  One football team scores on an exciting 20-yard run;  the other comes back and scores on an even more spectacular 40-yard passing play. 

Undoing is usually expressed on defense—somebody blocks a kick or steals the ball. 

However, even this kind of undoing is not entirely negative.  The defensive player is basically just trying to excel at his or her position.  And it’s not as if the player had a choice between undoing or outdoing.  The outfielder’s only job, while the other team is at bat, is to catch balls that other people are trying to hit away from him.  He can’t say, at the moment someone else hits a double, "I’m going to try to hit a home run now."

In such cases, does the relative amount of undoing outweigh the element of outdoing?  To argue such a case would require some fairly exotic arithmetic.

A more straightforward approach would be to simply acknowledge that human nature doesn’t easily lend itself to the elimination of all competition.  Since some forms of it are socially beneficial, and many other forms are socially neutral, doesn’t it make more sense to focus our objections just on the negative, undoing kind?

There will always no doubt be some people who would rather try to deter all types of competition.  Their motives are understandable, and their morals are no doubt of the highest order.  But they should consider one final point:

Efforts to eliminate competitive behavior are likely, in the final analysis, to just make competition take a more sneaky form.  And which is easier to do sneakily—win a footrace, or just trip a contestant?