High performance sport and sustainability: a contradiction of terms?

Abstract

Success in high performance sport has always been highly valued. Today, lucrative contracts, sponsorship deals and opportunities for celebrity status are balanced against substantial time spent training and high chances of failure. With pressure mounting on athletes to make the most of their athletic ‘investment’, the temptation to compromise their future well-being by exploiting their bodies for short-term gain and/or by cheating is growing. The aim of this paper is to explore the utility of sustainability science for thinking about these types of issues. Sustainability science is an emerging field which seeks to preserve the well-being of the planet and those on it by exploring the potential of nature and culture without compromising the future resource base. It specializes in developing holistic perspectives, considering multiple time scales, optimizing current systems without compromising the carrying capacity of the Earth, but also questioning the values and principles that dominate current ways of producing and consuming. Sustainability science acknowledges that we live in a rapidly changing world characterized by high levels of complexity and uncertainty. The proposition developed in this paper is that an exploration of sustainability perspectives can be generative in re-thinking and re-orienting the principles of high level competitive sports.

Keywords:

• athlete welfare
• continuity
• elite
• ethics
• learning
• respect
• sustainability science

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Pär Rylander and the other contributors of the Special Issue for their thoughtful critiques of earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Steve James’ documentary ‘Hoop dreams’ (1994) provides a particularly engaging examination of young athletes attempting to become professional sports people. This theme has also attracted attention in scholarship dealing with sport, race and ethnicity, see for example, the work of Brooks (2011).

2. Indeed, in sponsored sports such as men’s football, there appears to be a relatively tight, symbiotic relationship between elite sport and capitalism. A more sociologically inspired critique might point to the ways that sport works ideologically to serve a division of labour with subjects that have the right work ethic, respect for authority, predispositions to work in teams, for example.