Who cares about gladiators? An elite-sport-based concept of Sustainable Sport

Abstract

The aim of this study is to define the concept of sustainability as it applies to one of the most competitive and accelerated subsystem of human activity, elite sport (or professional sport) to construct a robust understanding of it. Based on qualitative research with Hungarian Olympic athletes, we created an elite-sport-based Sustainable Sport questionnaire with 23 statements to test and map emerging topics related to elite sport. Revealed elements of Sustainable Sport include (1) future orientation, (2) community, (3) decommodification, and (4) a redefined concept of performance. This definition reflects the problems of sport particularly, and (hypothetically) of society and the economy in general. It points toward both environmental sustainability (strong sustainability) and enhanced wellbeing and may serve as a broader guide to human activity.

Keywords:

• Degrowth
• elite sport
• leisure sport
• strong sustainability
• wellbeing

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Simon Milton for English-language proofreading. Project no. NKFIH-869-10/2019 was implemented with support provided from the National Research, Development and Innovation Fund of Hungary, financed under the Tématerületi Kiválósági Program funding scheme.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For a comprehensive review of the potential social impacts of elite sport, see De Rycke and De Bosscher (2019).

2 See also the concept of Degrowth (Kallis, Kerschner, and Martinez-Alier 2012; Liegey et al. 2013; Harangozó, Csutora, and Kocsis 2018) which is able to actively engage with a wider community of alternative economic and social movements, thereby creating a new approach for social and economic institutions that helps bring into being a more equitable economic system in an environmental and social sense. It promotes conditions for existence that do not depend on constant material growth.

3 Hungary has a long and successful sporting tradition and is currently ranked second in terms of the Summer Olympic gold medals per capita table, and third in total, with 175 gold medals to date (http://www.medalspercapita.com – updated 23/02/2018, accessed on 28/09/2020).

4 Cronbach’s Alpha of the 23-items is 0.656, which is acceptable (Vaske, Beaman, and Sponarski 2017), especially regarding the exploratory nature of our research. However, we do not intend to handle these items as an intact scale for measuring Sustainable Sport, as this appears to be a multi-faceted phenomenon in itself. For further scale development, more research is needed.

5 Twenty-one respondents were younger than 14 years old, and one ‘strongly disagreed’ with every statement. They were all excluded. The numbers referred to later in this paper reflect the final sample number after filtering (N = 366).

6 The exact values of the means in each subsample can be seen in Table A2.

7 A classic PCA run produced an eight-component solution for our data, with all components having eigenvalues greater than one. These components explain 59.16% of the total variance of the sample.

8 Only ‘Bet’ (see Table 2) could not be associated with any of the four components (each of the latter had some loadings for ‘Bet’, but none were of overriding importance). Thus ‘Bet’ was omitted and MDS and PCA were rerun with 22 statements. (All results are described according to this second analytical run.)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research, Development and Innovation Office, Hungary.