For a ‘United’ Kingdom and a ‘Greater’ Britain: the British Olympic Association and the limitations and contestations of ‘Britishness’

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Home-Nations of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales joined forces in competing in the Olympic Games under the banner of ‘Great Britain’ (or deviations thereof). The Olympics served as an important symbolic site for fostering and promoting a broader ‘British’ national identity. In practice, however, the prevalence and persistence of competing national identities and allegiances roiled early attempts to create a unified British Olympic team. These counter-prevailing forces of nationalism further served to undermine the British Olympic Association's ambitious attempt to unite the British Empire in a ‘Greater Britain’ team for the 1916 Berlin Olympic Games. As this work will reveal, ‘Britishness’ was a layered, contested and racially homogenous term that was interpreted and applied differently across various parts of the British Isles and its Empire.     

‘Science’, ‘Wind’ and ‘Bottom’: Eighteenth-Century Boxing Manuals

The eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a plethora of sporting professionals, many of whom were involved in developing training and coaching practices. Teaching the skills, the ‘science’, of boxing became an important source of income for professional fighters while some practitioners also developed careers as trainers, normally operating on behalf of the wealthy ‘amateurs’ who retained professionals in order to make profitable wagers. These practices were described in some of the early instructional manuals of the period, notably a detailed analysis of wrestling by Parkyns in 1713, who considered technique, fitness, and diet, and by Godfrey in 1747 who included a seminal section on boxing in his A Treatise upon the Useful Science of Defence. The proliferation of boxing manuals in the last quarter of the century reflected both a revival of interest in the sport and a desire to record the essential elements of this martial ‘science’ since it was only now that contemporaries believed a full understanding had been achieved of the importance of ‘wind’ (endurance), ‘bottom’ (courage), and ‘science’ (technique). This paper explores a number of texts where authors discussed these essential components of boxing performance and highlights the longevity of their methods of athletic preparation.     

‘Let’s work on your weaknesses’: Australian CrossFit coaching,masculinity and neoliberal framings of ‘health’ and ‘fitness’

CrossFit (CF) is one of the fastest growing exercise regimens in the world. However, sociologists have been relatively slow in examining the place of CF coaches in contemporary CF fitness culture. CF coaches are key figures in the production, promotion and consumption of CF fitness services. Therefore, coaches are a sociologically compelling group to examine. Drawing on interviews with male CF coaches in Tasmania, Australia, this paper argues that the way that CF coaches become qualified, interact with clients and understand ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ is shaped by the confluence of masculinity and neoliberalism. As CF grows in Australia alongside other fitness regimens, these findings pose a unique set of concerns for the Australian fitness industry, especially in relation to the ways that CF coaches translate the meaning and practice of ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ to their athletes.     

‘Activity choice’ and physical education in England and Wales

Though agencies, such as the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport and the Australian Sports Drug Agency, argue that much effort is being directed toward educating athletes about the virtues of fair play, the risks of drug use, and the ethics of cheating, the primary focus of government led initiatives is catching cheaters through testing. As a result, a decade following the inaugural Canadian Inquiry random drug testing is an accepted part of the culture of elite sport and is recognised as the most powerful deterrent for prospective abusers. As public confidence rests implicitly upon testing as the best and only direct means to establish a fair level of competition, it is perhaps not surprising that little attention is given to the ethical implications of testing as an invasion of privacy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical implications of testing athletes for the use of banned substances and determine if the current course of action is a morally justified suspension of privacy.     

Sports’ disciplinary legacy and the challenge of ‘coaching differently’

Be empowering. Be athlete-centered. Be autonomy supportive. These are three related topics currently being promoted by sport psychologists and sport pedagogists in an effort to recognize athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences and make coaching more holistic and coaches more considerate. This has led us to ask, how likely are such initiatives to lead to coaches putting their athletes at the center of the coaching process given that coaches’ practices have largely been formed through relations of power that subordinate and objectify athletes’ bodies through the regular application of a range of disciplinary techniques and instruments [e.g. Barker-Ruchti, N., &; Tinning, R. (2010). Foucault in leotards: Corporeal discipline in women's artistic gymnastics. Sociology of Sport Journal, 27, 229–250; Heikkala, J. (1993). Discipline and excel: Techniques of the self and body and the logic of competing. Sociology of Sport Journal, 10, 397–412; Gearity, B., &; Mills, J. P. (2012). Discipline and punish in the weight room. Sports Coaching Review, 1, 124–134]? In other words, to try to develop athlete-centered coaches capable of coaching in ways that will empower their athletes without also problematizing the discursive formation of coaches’ practices concerns us [Denison, J., &; Mills, J. P. (2014). Planning for distance running: Coaching with Foucault. Sports Coaching Review, 3, 1–16]. Put differently: how can athlete empowerment initiatives be anything more than rhetoric within a disciplinary framework that normalizes maximum coach control? It is this question that we intend to explore in this paper. More specifically, as Foucauldians, we will argue that coaching with greater consideration for athletes’ unique qualities and developmental differences needs to entail coaching in a less disciplinary way and with an awareness and appreciation of the many unseen effects that disciplinary power can have on coaches’ practices and athletes’ bodies.     

International medallists’ and non-medallists’ developmental sport activities – a matched-pairs analysis

The study examined developmental participation patterns of international top athletes. Pairs of 83 international medallists (including 38 Olympic/World Champions) and 83 non-medallists were matched by sport, age and gender. A questionnaire recorded their volume of organised (coach-led) practice/training in their respective main sport and in other sports through childhood, adolescence and adulthood, and also involvement in non-organised (peer-led) sport activity. Analyses revealed that the medallists started practice/training in their main sport at an older age than non-medallists and accumulated slightly, but significantly less main-sport practice/training through childhood/adolescence. But they participated in more practice/training in other sports, particularly before entering their main sport. The medallists also maintained engagement in other sports over more years and specialised later than the non-medallists. Other sports engaged in were mostly unrelated to an athlete’s main sport. The results were robust across different types of sports. The observations are reflected against tenets of the “deliberate practice” and “Developmental Model of Sport Participation” frameworks. Early diversified practice and learning experiences are discussed relative to the expansion of youngsters’ potential for future long-term learning. In elite athletes, interaction of sport-specific practice/training with early other-sports participation mostly facilitates long-term attainment of international senior medals.     

Situation criticality and basketball officials’ stress levels

Officials are expected to perform impeccably despite the wide range of stressors they experience. A stressor that officials frequently report is situation criticality. Situation criticality is comprised of score differential (i.e., more pressure in close games) and time remaining in a game (i.e., more pressure as time expires), which affects athletes’ stress levels. The present study explored the effect of situation criticality on officials’ stress levels. High school basketball officials (n = 108) with an average of 18.1 (SD = 11.2) years of officiating experience were given a survey packet containing game situations that varied in criticality. For each game situation (n = 9) officials completed the overall stress and appraisal portions of the Stress Appraisal Measure (SAM). Results revealed that situation criticality has an effect on officials’ perceived stress levels. Both threat and challenge appraisals were positively correlated with perceived stress. Overall, these findings indicate that officials’ stress levels fluctuate within games depending on score differential and time of game. The findings encourage officials to recognise and manage their stress, possibly through their appraisals. Additionally, the findings can affect the training of officials in the management of stress, as well as prompt the consideration of potential rule changes that reflect the increased situational demands on officials in critical situations (e.g., expanded instant replay).     

Children’s Aerobic Trainability and Related Questions

In response to Armstrong’s recent Special Topics review of “Top 10 Research Questions Related to Youth Aerobic Fitness,” this commentary revisits some of the points raised, particularly in relation to the question of whether a child?adult trainability difference does indeed exist. Discussed are the validity of much of the existing pediatric maximal oxygen consumption data upon which trainability conclusions are drawn, why differential trainability is likely a fact rather than a doubt, a reasoned novel approach to explaining the phenomenon, and how that explanation can bear upon and answer several of the other raised questions. The commentary is intended to inspire and encourage fresh thinking not only in relation to pediatric aerobic trainability, but more generally, regarding pediatric exercise physiology and performance and how they differ from those of adults.     

Exploring sport participants’ event and destination choices

ABSTRACT

This study explored the relationship between destination and event elements and an individual’s motivation to travel for sport events. Investigators surveyed participants who were planning to travel or had recently travelled to at least one running, cycling, or triathlon event in the current competitive race season. Data were analysed using exploratory factor analysis, regression, cross-tabulation, and ANOVA. The findings provide empirical evidence that travel behaviours vary by athlete type (runner, triathlete, and cyclist). The results of this study not only add to the push/pull theoretical framework but also provide strong practical implications for both event managers and destination marketers to better package destination attributes and event elements specific to athlete type.     

‘Race’ talk! Tensions and contradictions in sport and PE

Background: The universal sport discourses of meritocracy and equality are so engrained that few challenge them. The most cursory interest in sport, Physical Education (PE), and society will reveal that the lived reality is quite different. Racial disparities in the leadership and administration of sport are commonplace worldwide; yet, from research into ‘race’ in sport and PE, awareness of these issues is widespread, where many know that racism takes place it is generally claimed to be somewhere else or someone else. For many, this racism is part of the game and something to manipulate to steal an advantage; for others, it is trivial. This paper explores the contradictions and tensions of the author’s experience of how sport and PE students talk about ‘race’ and racism. ‘Race’ talk is considered here in the context of passive everyday ‘race’ talk, dominant discourses in sporting cultures, and colour blindness.

Theoretical framework: Drawing on Guinier and Torres’ [2003. The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy. London: Harvard University Press] ideas of resistance through political race consciousness and Bonilla-Silva’s [2010. Racism Without Racists: Colour-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Plymouth: Rowan and Littlefield] notion of colour blindness, the semantics of ‘race’ and racialisation in sport and PE are interrogated through the prism of critical race theory (CRT). CRT is used here to centre ‘race’ and racialised relations where disciplines have consciously or otherwise excluded them. Importantly, the centring of ‘race’ by critical race scholars has advanced a strategic and pragmatic engagement with this slippery concept that recognises its paradoxical but symbolic location in society.

Discussion: Before exploring ‘race’ talk in the classroom, using images from the sport media as a pedagogical tool, the paper considers how ‘race’ is recreated and renewed. The paper then turns to explore how the effortless turn to everyday ‘race’ talk in the classroom can be viewed as an opportunity to disrupt racialised assumptions with the potential to implicate those that passively do so. Further, the diagnostic, aspirational, and activist goals of political race consciousness are established as vehicles for a positive sociological experience in the classroom.

Conclusion: The work concludes with a consideration of the uses and dangers of passive ‘race’ talk and the value of a political race consciousness in sport and PE. Part of the explanation for the perpetuation of ‘race’ talk and the relative lack of concern with its impact on education and wider society is focused on how the sovereignty of sport and PE trumps wider social concerns of ‘race’ and racism because of at least four factors: (1) the liberal left discourses of sporting utopianism, (2) the ‘race’ logic that pervades sport, based upon the perceived equal access and fairness of sport as it coalesces with the (3) ‘incontrovertible facts’ of black and white superiority (and inferiority) in certain sports, ergo the racial justifications for patterns of activity in sport and PE, and (4) the racist logic of the Right perpetuated through a biological reductionism in sport and PE discourses.     

‘It’s alpha omega for succeeding and thriving’: parents,children and sporting cultivation in Norway

It has become increasingly apparent, internationally, that childhood is a crucial life-stage in the formation of predispositions towards sports participation and that parents are increasingly investing in the sporting capital of their children via a process of ‘concerted cultivation’. It is surprising, therefore, that parents’ involvement in the development of their children's sporting interests has received so little attention in Norway, given that sport is a significant pastime for Norwegians and participation has been steadily increasing – among youngsters, in particular – over the past several decades. Through a qualitative case study of a combined primary and secondary school in a small Norwegian city, this study sought to add to recent explorations of the role of parents in children's sporting involvement in Norway. As expected, it was evident that sport becomes taken for granted and internalised very early on in Norwegian children's lives. Less expected was the recognition that children's nascent sporting interests were often generated by sports clubs via early years schooling and, therefore, that parents played only one (albeit very important) part in the formation of their youngsters’ early sporting habits. Thus, parents, sports clubs and early years schooling appeared to form something akin to a ‘sporting trinity’ in youngsters’ nascent sporting careers. These findings may have implications for policy-makers looking towards Norway for a ‘recipe’ for sports participation.     

Performance analysis of elite men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to identify which game-related statistics discriminate winning and losing teams in men’s and women’s elite wheelchair basketball. The sample comprised all the games played during the Beijing Paralympics 2008 and the World Wheelchair Basketball Championship 2010. The game-related statistics from the official box scores were gathered and data were analysed in 2 groups: balanced games (final score differences ≤12 points) and unbalanced games (final score differences >13 points). Discriminant analysis allowed identifying the successful 2-point field-goals and free-throws, the unsuccessful 3-point field-goals and free-throws, the assists and fouls received as discriminant statistics between winning and losing teams in men’s balanced games. In women’s games, the teams were discriminated only by the successful 2-point field-goals. Linear regression analysis showed that the quality of opposition had great effects in final point differential. The field-goals percentage and free-throws rate were the most important factors in men’s games, and field-goals percentage and offensive rebounding percentage in women’s games. The identified trends allow improving game understanding and helping wheelchair basketball coaches to plan accurate practice sessions and, ultimately, deciding better in competition.     

‘Being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’: the dancing body-subject and inhabited transcendence

Sports studies is currently dominated by the intellectualist approach to understanding skill and expertise, meaning that questions about the phenomenological nature of skilled performance in sport have generally been overshadowed by the emphasis on the cognitive. By contrast, this article responds to calls for a phenomenology of sporting embodiment by opening up a philosophical exploration of the nature of athletic being-in-the-world. In particular, the paper explores the conceptualisation of immanence and transcendence in relation to the embodied practice of dance, engaging with Merleau-Ponty’s important insight that the body can be a source of transcendence. I also draw on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with professional contemporary dancers to explore dancers’ concepts of ‘being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’, and to suggest that during the actual embodied practice of dance, dancers do not experience transcendence and immanence as they are conceptualised in philosophy. Rather, I argue, dancers experience a third mode of being that is somehow in-between these two binary terms. I have called this ‘inhabited transcendence’.     

‘Women Can’t Skate that Fast and Shoot that Hard!’

The rise in interest in women’s ice hockey has been very recent compared to the men’s version of the game. While men have competed in the Olympics since 1920, women’s ice hockey was only introduced in 1998. A watershed moment for the growth of the women’s game was the inaugural Women’s World Hockey Championship (WWHC), held in Ottawa, Canada, in March of 1990. The event would be instrumental in showcasing the abilities of elite female players, garnering support for the inclusion of women’s ice hockey in the Olympic Games, and legitimating women’s hockey as an elite sport. However, while the popularity of the sport today remains a legacy of the 1990 WWHC, the event itself started from more modest beginnings. With the Championship, initially facing a lack of public and media interest, the tournament committee made several key changes, including a strategic marketing decision to have Team Canada wear pink jerseys, to elevate the profile of the tournament. Ultimately, media support and approval of the International Ice Hockey Federation and International Olympic Committee would allow the women’s hockey to become a mainstay on the world stage.     

‘Old’ Football and the ‘New’ Codes: Some Thoughts on the ‘Origins of Football’ Debate and Suggestions for Further Research

A close reading of recent contributions to the ‘origins of football’ debate suggests that there is now more consensus among scholars about the broad sequence of events than is rhetorically allowed. However, this consensus itself rests on some shared conceptual and methodological illusions. These include: a continual naivety about the use of the name ‘football’ in the primary source materials; asystematic underestimation of forms of play (and a collateral overestimation of the importance of rules and codifications) in the development of football; and, above all, a widely shared, and very dubious, conviction that the pursuit of the historical origins of football is a meaningful activity. This article analyses each ofthese illusions in turn and suggests some methodological and substantive alternatives to them. These alternatives sum to the conclusion that the origin of both modern football codes is a far more remarkable and many-sided story than has been appreciated, even in the very best research to date. Moreover, it is a story whose many dimensions and implications go well beyond the borders of Britain, and indeed beyond the history of ‘soccer’ or ‘rugby’ alone.     

The Alpine Club of Canada’s ‘Mountain Heritage’: Adventure and Advocacy in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Abstract

Founded in 1906, the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) was a key proponent of mountain adventure and advocacy. This paper examines the club’s annual camps, physical culture, and conservation involvement as indicators to understand the integration of mountaineering and parks in Canada in the twentieth century. It surveys the club’s origins and highlights its shifting agendas. The ACC mountaineering camps and classic alpine ascents invented a tradition for middle-class sport and tourism in mountain parks, particularly in the Rockies and Columbia Mountains. The club advocated for climbers but also for conservation in wild places. It participated in contested debates on parks and resource use as a stakeholder on public lands. The paper argues the ACC was a leading proponent of mountain pursuits, conservation, and tourism in a complex political ecology of engaged land use for sport and recreation intertwined with physical spaces and the social production of mountain parks in Canada. Adventure and advocacy were its legacy as well as education on the land. Based on archives, alpine journals, and other published sources, the paper illustrates an integration of people and places in landscapes of sport as well as contemporary mountain adventure, tourism, and conservation issues in Canada and internationally.