Do mega-sport events undermine labor rights? Although NGO and media reports have documented severe abuses surrounding events such as the FIFA Men's World Cup and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, systematic cross-national evidence remains limited. This study examines how hosting mega-sport events affects labor rights using a stacked difference-in-differences design anchored to award-year timing. Leveraging within-event matching and event-time analyses, the study distinguishes anticipatory, preparatory, and post-award dynamics. It finds evidence of labor-rights deterioration in the years immediately preceding event awards, consistent with anticipatory pressures during the bidding phase. Following the award, however, labor rights improve on average during the preparation period, particularly in lower-income/nonhigh-income host countries, suggesting the influence of international scrutiny and reform incentives. Contrary to expectations, construction intensity does not systematically condition these effects. Together, the findings reconcile case-based accounts of abuse with aggregate institutional trends, showing that mega-events generate short-term risks but may also catalyze labor-rights improvements under conditions of heightened visibility.
This article explores institutional responsibility for supporting the whole person development of Black men student-athletes participating within NCAA Division I football and men's basketball through intersecting lenses of athletic labor, identity foreclosure, post-sport transition, and human rights. Although college athletics offer meaningful opportunities through education, community, visibility, and social mobility, it also derives significant institutional value from the athletic performance and labor of Black men. Drawing on scholarship and informed by the lived experience of a former Division I student-athlete, mentor, and higher-education practitioner, the article examines how institutional environments prioritizing athletic performance over whole person development may contribute to identity foreclosure and limit opportunities beyond sport. Informed by scholarship on athletic identity, racialized labor, and post-sport transition, the analysis positions Black men student-athletes within systems that emphasize athletic production while giving less attention to identity development and long-term preparation beyond athletic participation. Although reforms-such as name, image, and likeness (NIL) reform-have altered the economic landscape of college athletics, concerns related to dignity, agency, whole person development, and life beyond college sport persist. This article reframes identity foreclosure and post-sport transition as concerns of human rights and institutional responsibility, bridging athlete development literature with discussions of dignity, labor, agency, and institutional accountability.
In recent years, escalating scrutiny directed at transgender women athletes has revealed profound contradictions in sport's commitments to safety, fairness, and human rights. Mainstream discourse often positions trans women as a safeguarding threat within women's sports. This article asks: What of the safeguarding failures that have allowed trans women athletes to be targeted? Using a multistage qualitative analysis, the article compares the International Olympic Committee's Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations with its 2026 Policy on the Protection of the Female (Women's) Category in Olympic Sport. The analysis situates these documents alongside selected human-rights and Olympic frameworks and uses a transfeminist lens to assess how policies produce gendered legibility, authorize discrimination, and recast trans women as risks to be governed rather than athletes to be protected. Examples of contemporary governance reveal a central safeguarding contradiction in sport: Institutions increasingly speak in the language of dignity while legitimating the surveillance, regulation, and exclusion of certain athletes. Centering trans women in such examples clarifies not only the harms they face but the structural limits of safeguarding regimes tethered to binary sex and institutional self-preservation.
This article examines human rights considerations at the crossroads of athlete activism and Olympic political neutrality through the 2026 Winter Olympics helmet controversy involving Ukrainian skeleton athlete Vladyslav Heraskevych. While scholarship on athlete activism has largely focused on racial justice, nationalism, anti-authoritarian protest, and environmental advocacy, the Heraskevych case introduces a distinct dimension: commemorative activism under war conditions. By wearing a "helmet of remembrance" honoring Ukrainian athletes killed in the Russian invasion, Heraskevych engaged not in oppositional protest but in embodied memorial speech. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) deemed the helmet a violation of the Olympic Charter, which prohibits political demonstrations at Olympic venues. This enforcement reveals a fundamental tension within Olympic governance. When remembrance of fallen athletes is categorized as political propaganda, neutrality ceases to function as an apolitical safeguard and instead becomes an instrument regulating memory itself. Drawing on human rights principles, this article argues that the Heraskevych case expands athlete activism theory beyond resistance to injustice and highlights how commemoration during wartime destabilizes the IOC's claim to political neutrality.
Sport occupies a paradoxical position within human rights scholarship. It is often celebrated as a site of dignity, equality, and development, yet it has also functioned as a mechanism of exclusion, assimilation, and bodily regulation. For Indigenous peoples, however, movement is not simply physical activity; it is ceremony, prayer, and relational accountability enacted through motion. This article argues that sport must be theorized as a human rights site in which Indigenous nations exercise cultural continuity, political presence, gender justice, and collective self-determination. In this sense, sport constitutes a practice of exercising sovereignty (Ali-Joseph et al., ). Rather than treating athletics as a peripheral policy domain, this article positions sport as an embodied space in which sovereignty is practiced, grounded in relationships to land and future generations.
