Sporting parents on the pool deck: living out a sporting culture?

Abstract

Three athletes' narratives that centre on their perceptions of how their parents' identities were positioned amidst performance and perfection discourses are the focus of this paper. The aim of this research was to critically explore and categorise the three athletes' narrative about their parents in relation to performance and perfection discourses in sport. We explore whether parents ‘lived the part of the athlete parent', ‘resisted the part of the athlete parent', or ‘played the part of the athlete parent'. This narrative gives voice to three athletes and has been subsequently utilised as the primary methodological approach. This paper makes visible how knowledge born from a sporting culture may influence the identity of athletes' parents. The issues raised are important for athletes, sporting parents and coaches to consider.

Keywords:

• narrative
• identity
• culture
• sport
• parents

Notes

1. See McMahon (2010) for further details of participant recruitment.

2. Bain (1990) refers to technocracy as people being ‘viewed as human resources where attention is focused on the development of an increasingly effective and efficient means for achieving goals’ (p. 29).

3. ‘Slim to win’ is a dominant ideology (McMahon and Dinan-Thompson 2008, McMahon 2010, McMahon and Dinan-Thompson 2011, McMahon et al. 2012, McMahon and Penney 2012a, 2012b) that was shown to permeate the Australian swimming culture both at a club and elite level. The slim swimmer body was perceived to be more competitive than the swimmer body which was not perceived as slim. This has similarly been illuminated in the work by Jones et al. (2005).