Home of (or for?) Champions? The Politics of High-Performance/Elite and Community sport at New Zealand’s Home of Cycling

Abstract

Creating inclusiveness and user-friendly spaces is a challenge to any new sporting venue. This article explores the attempts by various ‘stakeholders’ involved in the production of the Avantidrome, New Zealand's ‘Home of Cycling’ to align the rhetorics with the realities for creating a new velodrome across its first 20 months of operation. More specifically, there exists a tension in the ‘selling’ of a sport-for-all model with the public construction of a high-performance, elite-use facility. In neoliberal times, such contradictions seemingly proliferate when public spending blends and blurs with corporate sponsorship and a results-driven framework for funding elite sport while being aligned with visions of community. Combining user interviews and sustained on-site ethnographic observations with Foucault's theories of power, we seek to understand how these multiple entities produced relational forms of power that resulted in efforts to accommodate both community-based and high performance models within the same cycling space.

Keywords:

• Community
• foucault
• high-performance sport
• neoliberalism
• velodrome
• whiteness

Notes

1 In New Zealand, ‘Rogernomics,’ named for NZ Labor Government's Minister of Finance (1984-1988) Roger Douglas, followed the neoliberal global patterns of market-driven approaches to social and economic problems.

2 Such achievements include: for track, Greg Henderson, Commonwealth Gold medalist 2002; Sarah Ulmer, Olympic and World Champion 2004; Alison Shanks, World Champion 2009 and 2012; and for BMX, Sarah Walker, World Champion 2009 and Olympic Silver medalist 2012.

3 From the 316 completed online survey responses, 76.65% of respondents drive and 17.25% cycle to Velodrome. Furthermore, users were predominantly from Hamilton (116) and Cambridge (103) respectively; 79 respondents provided no location.

4 Based on a cumulative summary of observations across Monday-Thursday evenings, March–July 2015.

5 From the 331 survey respondents who identified their ethnicity, 291 were European [white], contrasted with other groups, including Maori (17), Asian (4), Pacific Islander (2), and Middle Eastern (1).

6 While precise statistics for Cambridge are not obtainable, census statistics from both 2006 and 2013 indicate that the Waipa district is older and earns more. Additionally, the Waipa 2050 Demographics Profile Statement (n.d.) reports that “the resident population identifies more as European (80%) than the rest of the Waikato Region (70%), and New Zealand (68%)” (p. 5).