As the Olympic Games function not only as a global sporting event but also as a powerful system of institutional governance, inclusion in the Olympic programme has become a key marker of international legitimacy for sports. This article examines the discursive barriers to the Olympic inclusion of Wushu by analysing how key stakeholders interpret and negotiate Olympic standards within global sport governance. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory approach and informed by neo-institutionalism and Foucauldian perspectives, the article analyses in-depth interviews with 58 stakeholders, including officials, referees, coaches and athletes from 27 countries. Three core categories are identified: institutional pluralism and governance fragmentation; tensions between standardised discourse and local practices; and dilemmas in legitimacy construction. The findings show that Wushu's Olympic exclusion is not primarily the result of technical insufficiency or organisational weakness but emerges from a multi-layered discursive structure in which fragmented governance generates divergent interpretations of Olympic standards, culturally embedded knowledge conflicts with technocratic standardisation and competing narratives undermine coherent institutional legitimacy. By foregrounding discourse as a central mechanism of institutional access, the study contributes to sociological debates on cultural politics, legitimacy and the integration of non-Western practices within Western-centric global sport governance systems.
Football in the Maghreb has long been intertwined with politics, but the emergence of Ultras groups in the mid-1990s transformed stadiums into arenas of political expression. In Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, Ultras have mobilized youth dissent through chants, banners, and stadium performances, particularly during periods of regime crisis. While football clubs historically symbolized anticolonial struggle, contemporary Ultras movements increasingly voice the frustrations of marginalized youth excluded from formal politics. Utilizing a Remote Qualitative Design to address access constraints, this cross-national comparative synthesis analyzes primary digital repertoires, including viral anthems and social media archives, triangulated with media reports and academic literature. Using a Social Semiotic lens, the findings demonstrate that Ultras create alternative spaces of participation, turning stadiums into platforms for collective mobilization and shaping public discourse under restrictive regimes.
Sparring partners in China's whole-nation system ( juguo tizhi ) for elite sport perform bodily labour indispensable to competitive success yet remain at the margins of institutional recognition, occupying a position in which embodied labour is appropriated while its producer accrues neither reward nor visibility. Situating this predicament within debates on labour exploitation, alienation and the culture of risk in sport, and drawing on Honneth's recognition theory supplemented by Bourdieu's bodily capital and Foucault's disciplined body, the study analyses life-history interviews with 12 current and former sparring partners from three provinces and four sports. The findings reveal threefold disrespect: instrumental erosion of the body dissolves self-trust; bureaucratic exclusion damages self-respect and systematic concealment of contributions corrodes self-esteem. These forms of misrecognition interlock and accumulate over careers, producing deep identity fissures. Sparring partners are not passive recipients of disrespect, however; they fashion alternative recognition strategies to sustain selfhood. The study contributes to the sociology of sport and the sociology of work by documenting the hidden human costs of achievement-centred governance and offering an extreme case of invisible, appropriated bodily labour.
This research draws on resonance theory to analyse how the Arctic Winter Games (AWG) mitigate features linked with professionalized sport events – dynamics that can act as resonance blockers – to sustain conditions more conducive to resonance. Utilizing a qualitative multimethod approach, we analysed organizational documents, interviews, surveys and participant observation from the 2023 AWG and found that the AWG actively resist resonance blockers by challenging sportification through event governance and vernacular games, tempering hyper-competition and emphasizing value-rational orientations. These conditions create a sport event comparatively favourable for resonance experiences, illustrating how community sport events can be organized to protect spaces more conducive to meaningful relationships amid growing professionalization pressures.
Women's cricket in India is increasingly celebrated as a symbol of national progress and gender inclusion, yet women's experiences as spectators remain underexamined. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory and reflexive autoethnographic observations, this article presents a situated account of the ICC Women's World Cup match held in Navi Mumbai in October 2025. It examines how gender, affect, and the organisation of DY Patil Stadium shaped the author's experiences of spectatorship, drawing on observations and interactions across the shared spaces occupied by her companion and nearby spectators. Guided by Puwar's concept of ‘bodies out of place’, the article explores how women spectators were simultaneously visible and how their experiences of inclusion appeared to be negotiated within masculinised stadium environments. Drawing on contextualised observations, the article suggests that while women athletes are celebrated as symbols of national pride and progress, women cricketers and spectators may also experience forms of gendered surveillance, sexualisation, and infrastructural constraint. The study considers women's spectatorship not simply as a neutral backdrop to sport, but as a way of examining how gendered power relations may be experienced, negotiated, and at times challenged through women's visible and vocal participation. The article contributes to discussions on affective atmospheres, sound, and spatial organisation by offering a situated perspective that invites reflection on celebratory narratives that may equate growing women's cricket audiences with gender equity, while recognising the study's limited scope beyond this specific case.
To advance understanding of socially constructed motherhood and sport, researchers are exploring elite athlete mothers’ sporting comebacks on social media (e.g. Instagram). The role of community aspects (e.g. belongingness, trust) linked to athlete mothers’ sporting career negotiation in digital media holds potential to expand understanding of socio-cultural career affordances for these sportswomen. This study explored the sense of community meanings of four Canadian elite curler mothers’ (e.g. (inter)national rankings, winning tournaments) negotiation of sporting career post-partum on Instagram. A total of 217 Instagram posts for each athlete, covering from most recent birth announcements to summer 2024 were segmented into themes related to family, sporting career and community (e.g. curling spaces, fan interactions). Posts were theorized as small stories (e.g. images, everyday moments) shaping big story narrative meaning(s) using dialogical narrative analysis. A big story narrative of growth and stability amidst belongingness was shaped by small stories of striving for excellence and expanding communities and careers . These results provide novel theoretical insight into the normalization of motherhood in elite curling spaces linked with socially constructed community meanings. Small stories revealed tensions intertwined with performance excellence and sporting career expansion, supported through community meanings, for a select few. These findings shed light on motherhood in elite curling, inclusion/equity, maternal rights, and provide future directions for social media research on motherhood and sport.
Contemporary sport is increasingly organised around a prosumer logic in which audiences simultaneously consume, produce, and circulate sporting content through digital and networked media. This shift has intensified the commodification, mediatisation, and rationalisation of sport consumption, positioning fan participation as a central organising principle. In contrast, the Masters Tournament represents a striking institutional anomaly within this landscape. Through the prohibition of most electronic devices, the maintenance of analogue scoreboards, and the regulation of patron behaviour, the first major tournament in the men's professional golf calendar curates a form of consumption rooted in presence, scarcity, and tradition, whilst permitting limited personal image capture through digital cameras. Drawing on sociological theory, particularly Weber's analysis of rationalisation, Bauman's critique of consumer society, and scholarship on the collapse of production-consumption boundaries, this article examines The Masters as a critical case of the selective management of participation within prosumer sport culture. The analysis demonstrates how institutional control, exclusion, and symbolic power preserve a distinctive, presence-based mode of consumption within a digitally saturated sporting landscape. The article contributes to the sociology of sport by interrogating the limits of prosumption and demonstrating how elite sporting institutions regulate participation to maintain cultural authority, prestige, and social distinction.
With sport's modernity and commercialization as a backdrop, we investigate private football academies in New Zealand and Norway and discuss their institutional resonance with the volunteer-based mainstream football field. We ask: How do private football academies present themselves online, in terms of their roles and responsibilities? Drawing on institutional theories, we analysed the internet sites of four private academies in each country and identified three dominant logics therein. First, private academies are competence-oriented, documenting and flagging the education and experience of their coaches. Second, the private academies are focused on individual player skills development (over the collectivity of a club/team). Third, the private football academies cultivate a commercial outlook. The latter is the most distinguishing characteristic compared to football clubs. The understanding of commercialization and commodification of football goes beyond the mainstream system of clubs and associations. If equal opportunities are a goal, policymakers, administrators and practitioners should be aware of the growth of academies and discuss the possibilities and implications of a two-tiered development system.
Equestrian sport is inherently high-risk, and falling off the horse constitutes the most common mechanism of injury and long-term impairment. While previous research has examined the physical causes and consequences of falls, less is known about how young equestrians make sense of risk and attribute meaning to falling. This study therefore explores how equestrians construct, negotiate, and normalise risk in contemporary digital environments. Using online ethnography, 61 posts and 6723 comments associated with the hashtag #ridingfails on TikTok were analysed. Field notes were thematically synthesised into composite narratives and interpreted drawing on Goffman's frame analysis in conjunction with concepts of social media logic. The findings indicate that falling off is framed as an expected and routine aspect of equestrian practice, shaped by cultural ideals of resilience and toughness. At the same time, these experiences are keyed as ‘failures’ through #ridingfails, while more serious injuries are largely absent. Rather than being solely negative, falls are also framed as markers of progression and are frequently accompanied by comics. Moreover, through processes of fabrication, falls are sometimes transformed into entertainment, illustrating how visibility, popularity, and connectivity shape platformed risk cultures and equestrians’ understandings of failure and inherent risk. These keyings are, however, contested by ‘TikTok trainers’, who offer unsolicited advice on riders’ performance, technique, and competence, and in some cases raise concerns regarding horse welfare. Overall, the study demonstrates that risk in contemporary equestrianism is shaped through deeply mediatized framings in which platform logics intersect with cultural ideals. These findings highlight the importance of developing safety interventions that resonate with young riders’ lived and digitally embedded risk cultures.
The aim of this article is to highlight possible concerns linked with the sporting experiences of dependent older people by drawing connections to their individual social trajectories. In an environment favourable to the promotion of sport in France (i.e., the Paris 2024 Olympic Games), the dormant sporting habitus seems to have been reactivated. This thesis was put to the test in an ethnographic survey of 33 dependent older people in eight residential care institutions in the Alsace region, in eastern France. The results show the different adaptations of bodily habitus in institutions for older people. Everyday behaviours were refocused to preserve a bodily identity undermined by advancing age. During preparation for a local Olympics event, physical activities reactivated the athletic part of the bodily habitus. This was integrated by some participants through competitive or recreational experiences.
In this article, we discuss elite female cricketers’ experiences of playing during a period of rapid organisational and commercial change. As the first article to centre research specifically on the women who are playing cricket through this period, we draw on the wider lens of research on gender and professionalisation to document how elite female cricketers experience the global game. Utilising semi-structured, online interviews with elite female cricketers who have experience of playing in The Women's Big Bash League and/or The Hundred, we explored issues of visibility; career development; skills development; and the revolutionising potential of changes in the current and future game. These findings highlight both the many positive experiences of elite women in the game and the distinct developmental trajectories of the professionalisation of women's sport relative to the men's game. Our research highlights how professionalisation entails both divergent and convergent processes in women's sport, and thus how such processes are both geographically and sports-specific in character.
In this article, I explore the potential of Gloria Anzald & uacute;a's autohistoria-teoria as a deco-lonial methodology for qualitative research in sport. Drawing on an in-depth narrative with Brazilian Olympic rugby athlete Ta & iacute;s Bernal Balconi, I examine how athletic experi-ence can illuminate Anzald & uacute;a's stages of conocimiento: arrebato (rupture), nepantla (contradiction), and Coyolxauhqui (recomposition). I interpret the athlete's reflections on injury, exclusion, and healing as forms of embodied theorizing moments in which the body itself becomes a site of ethical, emotional, and spiritual knowledge. By reading sport through autohistoria-teor & iacute;a, I reframe the athlete's narrative not as data but as the-ory-in-motion. I show how listening, vulnerability, and relational care emerge as epi-stemic practices that challenge performance-driven paradigms in sport research. The study contributes to ongoing feminist and decolonial debates by proposing autohis-toria-teor & iacute;a as a relational and transformative methodology that recognizes the body as both subject and source of knowledge.
This article examines safe sport policy development within transnational sport for development and peace (SDP) collaborations in Southern Africa, focusing on perspectives from Global North partners currently engaged in projects in Zambia and other Southern African countries. Drawing on cultural framing theory and postcolonial theory, the study explores how safeguarding initiatives emerge, evolve, and interact with local contexts in programs aimed at addressing interpersonal violence in sport. Informed by qualitative interviews with five Global North sport stakeholders, findings reveal that safeguarding policies were primarily shaped by Northern research and organisational mandates, raising concerns about epistemic dominance and cultural resonance. While policies addressing issues such as harassment, abuse, and gender equality were introduced, their implementation faced challenges linked to socio-economic constraints, local norms, and legal frameworks, particularly regarding LGBTQIA + protections. The analysis highlights persistent power asymmetries rooted in funding structures and global governance, alongside efforts to mitigate these through long-term partnerships and local empowerment strategies. The study underscores the need for context-sensitive approaches and locally driven research to enhance safeguarding effectiveness in SDP collaborations.
This article examines the types of racism experienced in community sport in Australia. Drawing on interviews with 51 community sport stakeholders, including 26 individuals with lived experiences of racism in sport, the article shows how Australian community sport maintains white dominance through everyday racisms including: the use of racial norms and stereotypes that shape how Indigenous peoples and racialised settlers are treated; favouritism and racial exclusion; and a consistent lack of action against racism. The types of racism work together in a self-sustaining system that makes them challenging to tackle, supporting the maintenance of white dominance in Australian community sport. This article addresses a significant gap in the literature by detailing the types, extent and nuances of everyday racisms in Australian community sport, particularly those that operate beyond the more visible and overt forms of interpersonal racism.
Live sport events are increasingly characterised by highly visible and participatory spectator cultures, including costumes, signs/placards, collective singing and choreographed crowd practices. While such forms of engagement have been documented in existing research, less attention has been paid to how carnivalesque festivity, dramaturgical self-presentation and mediated fandom operate together as an integrated cultural formation. Drawing on the case of Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) events, this article develops a Mediated Carnivalesque Model that brings together Bakhtin's theory of carnival, Goffman's dramaturgy, and scholarship on performative sport fandom and mediated spectatorship. The model conceptualises PDC darts as an illustrative and intensified example of contemporary mediated leisure in which spectators’ expressive participation is both enabled and structured through organisational scripting and broadcast visibility. It operationalises the carnivalesque through aesthetic inversion, norm suspension, collective excess and institutionally bounded transgression, and demonstrates how these dynamics function as resources for impression management, identity performance and co-production. In doing so, the framework advances understanding of fan culture by showing how commercial orchestration, attention economies and performative identity work interact within live sport settings, offering a lens for analysing spectator cultures across mediated sport environments.
This study examines Canadian media narratives surrounding Alphonso Davies from 2016 to 2024, the Canadian sports/media complex, analyzing 116 media items to understand how transnational belonging is constructed, negotiated, and contested for refugee athletes. Through a postcolonial narrative inquiry, informed on theories of racialized governmentality, multiculturalism, and the white colonial sport/media complex, we identify three interrelated narrative motifs that construct conditional belonging: the “ideal refugee,” “choosing the nation,” and the “ghostly figure of the traitor.” The ideal refugee narrative transforms Davies' forced displacement into a triumphant arc from vulnerability to success, erasing the Liberian civil wars' political complexities and his family's structural challenges in Canada. Instead, his story affirms Canada as a benevolent sanctuary and constructs him as a “racialized neoliberal subject” whose success validates meritocracy while obscuring systemic racism. Media narratives demand Davies to repeatedly justify his choice of Canada, positioning his Canadianness as perpetually conditional despite his 11-year path to citizenship. Meanwhile, athletes who chose other nations—Owen Hargreaves and Asmir Begovic-become “ghostly figures” of betrayal, revealing the fragility of belonging for those who fail to demonstrate sufficient gratitude and loyalty. Our analysis demonstrates how sports/media narratives function as “ritual acts of national belonging” and public trials for transnational athletes, sorting bodies along colonial borders of presentability versus expellability. While Davies' celebration represents rare media solidarity toward racialized refugees, it simultaneously reveals the incompleteness of Canada's multicultural promise and the limits of national belonging regimes. We conclude by advocating for post-national frameworks that challenge the nation's monopoly over belonging and facilitate decolonization of political identities.
