As Atlanta prepares to host eight 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup matches, including a semifinal match, there is a need to reflect on the historicity of major sporting events in the city and provide an account of their inauspicious effects on the subaltern. In this paper, I document the hegemony of major sporting events in Atlanta and the formation and structure of a historic bloc to produce these events. I account for the relations of production or effects on the subaltern of the city: a protracted urban apartheid against low-income, Black neighborhoods and homeless persons in and around the city. This urban apartheid is an economy of dispossession defined not only as displacement but also appropriation, suppression, or substitution of their stories and histories to promote The New New South rhetoric, Atlanta as probusiness, growth-minded, progressive, and racially harmonious.
During the Second Republic in Spain (1931-1936), women's football surged. Based on historical newspaper and magazine accounts, this article shows that, in comparison with preceding decades, during the Republican years, more women's teams were formed, more matches were played, and these matches took place in a wider geographical area. Spanish media paid more attention to women's football, and newspapers and magazines informed about this sport in neutral or supportive ways slightly more often (and in an opposing manner less frequently). Before 1931, women's football had penetrated popular culture (e.g., vaudeville theater). In the 1930s, the press reported on intersections between this sport and manifestations of popular culture (variety theater and bullfighting). During the Second Republic, the expansion of women's football was part of a general process of women's emancipation by which women gained new civil and political rights, and entered arenas where women had been previously absent.
As one of the most remarkable weightlifters and Olympians of the twentieth century, Naim S & uuml;leymano & gbreve;lu, stands as an epic athlete in the history of modern weightlifting. A three-time Olympic champion (1988, 1992, and 1996) and seven-time world champion, he broke world records in the fifty-six, sixty, and sixty-four kilograms weight divisions, helping his adopted country of T & uuml;rkiye to become a leading weightlifting nation. Born in Bulgaria to an ethnic Turkish minority family, he defected to T & uuml;rkiye at the age of nineteen. Despite his political role advocating for the rights of his Turkish brethren, his sporting life was a long journey, proving the willpower of a true hero, one who returned to his sport each time with success, finally entering the ranks of weightlifting Hall of Fame by the International Weightlifting Federation. This paper is an account of the personal journey of Naim S & uuml;leymano & gbreve;lu, who left a lasting legacy both for T & uuml;rkiye and the weightlifting world. This study applied a historical narrative analysis framework, presented in a chronological manner, and relying on archival materials, official documents, personal collections, and periodicals.
This study draws on archival materials from Academia Historica to examine how, after the Korean War, Taiwan's Nationalist government used the party-state-military apparatus to promote martial arts as part of its Cold War cultural strategy. This effort aimed to assert ideological legitimacy, construct cultural orthodoxy, and counteract diplomatic marginalization amid geopolitical isolation. In the post-Cold War era, as martial arts administration in Taiwan gradually shed its overt ties to the military and the ruling party, martial arts evolved into a more civilian-oriented national movement. Nevertheless, Taiwan's efforts to internationalize martial arts have yielded limited results. In addition to internal challenges such as disputes over leadership and institutional reform, these efforts have also been hindered by external factors, notably the dominance of international frameworks favoring Olympic-standardized martial arts competition.
Despite Catalonia being one of the most industrialized and developed regions of Spain (in capitalist terms) for most of the twentieth century, no Catalan is among the list of thirty-six prime ministers who governed the country during that period. Sports governance offers a very different picture, as seven Catalans have served as president of the Spanish Olympic Committee. Catalan influence even reached the top of the international Olympic movement through Juan Antonio Samaranch, one of the most influential presidents (1980-2001) in IOC history, and continues to the present day through his son, Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., one of the Committee's vice presidents and a candidate in the March 2025 presidential election. The objective of this article is to critically explore the process that led to the "Catalan takeover" of the Spanish Olympic movement in 1924, which is at the origins of this influence. Although in line with Catalan sporting supremacy of the time and also with the ambition of its leaders (the Catalan nationalist party Lliga Regionalista) to govern Spain, this takeover was achieved against the latter's will and, what is even more paradoxical, under the anti-Catalanist Primo de Rivera dictatorship.
In southern Alberta, Canada, during the early twentieth century, fraternal organizations such as the Oddfellows, Moose, Elks, and Eagles employed boxing and wrestling to advance their interests and assist in molding members to demonstrate the discipline and respectability expected of a member. These organizations not only appropriated symbols of the natural world-Elk, Eagle, and Moose-to stake a claim to the land and space that they occupied but also offered male settlers social support and economic benefits in the case of injury or death when such support was largely unavailable. Boys and young men represented ideal candidates for membership to continue and promote the brotherhoods' shared beliefs and values, and boxing and wrestling were considered valuable activities for achieving these ends. As a result, boxing and wrestling benefitted fraternal societies, allowing them to attract new members while entrenching existing settler colonial relations on Canada's prairie west.
This article critically examines the material interests and political struggles that shaped the participation of the Canadian men's national hockey team in the 1978 International Ice Hockey Federation's (IIHF) World Championships and beyond in international hockey. The analysis is drawn from extensive archival sources, enabling a fresh understanding of the quickly changing international hockey landscape in this era, and of Canada's role in it, thus extending the existing historiography. The participation of an ad hoc team of Canadian National Hockey League (NHL) players in the IIHF World Championships for the second year in a row marked a firmer alliance between the IIHF, the NHL, and the NHL Players' Association, with Alan Eagleson as the key intermediary and main beneficiary. Crucially, the alignment of these material interests and the concentration of power in Eagleson's hands were countenanced by the Government of Canada-despite credible accusations of Eagleson's impropriety-furthering the erosion of amateurism and the influence of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association.
Using COVID-19 as an example, this paper analyzes the value of sports research in and about the context of emergency events, exploring underlying methodological foundations, methodological possibilities, and future perspectives. It is argued that sports research about the context of emergency events is not "past tense" but "future tense." The dilution of an emergency does not diminish its timeliness or research potential; rather, it highlights the need to turn to ethnomethodological
Higher education institutions-especially those in North America-appear recently to have bestowed their imprimatur on sports media as a field of academic study through the codification of curricula and conferring of sports media-specific degrees, embracing the "toy department" as a stop-gap measure to address university budget shortfalls.1 The groundwork is set for sports media to be a growth area in mass communication and sports studies education. These new academic programs are popular with students but also tend to "predominately focus on skills-oriented and preprofessional courses."2 Thus, sports media courses prepare students for industry-related jobs, but the offerings lack social and historical context of why sport matters to society and individuals risk replicating structures that have marginalized groups within sports such as women, people with disabilities, and individuals from the Global South.3 However, sports media curricula developers can learn much from decades-old studies of the convergences of sports and communication into an entity rich with cultural, economic, and social implications.4 To provide students and scholars with a well-rounded perspective, increased intentionality in the development of curriculum and coursework in sports media connected to the sociocultural implications of the MediaSport theoretical framework is necessary and warranted.5 The subsequent portions of this essay provide rationales for various curricula considerations.
