‘Tidy, toned and fit’: locating healthism within elite athlete programmes

ABSTRACT

Coaches and athletes have been increasingly inundated with power related ‘truths’ about their bodies, health and performance as they construct their subjectivities. Over the last couple of decades in New Zealand, schools have initiated elite athlete programmes (EAPs) for a select few students based primarily on their athletic ability and fitness levels. Drawing on Gore's techniques of power, my study investigated how healthism and the cult of the body discourses were (re)produced, negotiated and resisted by coaches and elite athletes and how body pedagogies defined and shaped bodies in two high school EAPs. My analysis suggested that ‘toned and fit’ bodies signified responsible athletes compared to ‘fat’ bodies and that elite athletes disciplined their bodies to overcome pain to remain productive. In both EAPs, power circulated at the micro-level of pedagogical practice to normalise and monitor the athletes’ diet, body weight and shape, and reinforced tensions between prudentialism and hedonism.

KEYWORDS:

• Body pedagogies
• cult of the body
• elite athletes
• Foucault
• healthism

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Margaret Walshaw, Professor Peter Kelly and the reviewers for their positive and constructive comments as well as their encouragement in the submission of this paper, and the participants and participating schools that dedicated time to be involved in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was also supported in part by grants from the Massey University Research Fund and a Massey University Research Award.