Benjamin Mole
Loughborough University, London Campus

Sport, Performance and Sustainability
165 pages, hardcover
Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge 2023 (Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society)
ISBN 978-1-032-25463-0
What at first may appear as a standard appraisal of sport’s indifferent relationship with the environment, quickly reveals itself to be a thorough journey along the many of the philosophical fault lines that most in sport fear to tread. The editors’ ingenious point of departure is a contemporary reading of the sportification model, originally derived from Guttmann’s (1978) From Ritual to Record. This gives them, and the chapter authors, a much clearer vantage point from which to see where sport’s relationship with the environment may have gone astray.
The sportification model has seven criteria, namely: specialisation, rationalisation, standardisation, regimentation, organisation, equalisation, and quantification (pp. 7–8). In short, it is processes/phenomena that happen to sports to optimise performance above all else. The model is presented early in the book and then used throughout to clearly point out barriers and opportunities for environmentalism to become a greater part of sport’s logics. Beginning at the root of the logics allows the arguments to be far more efficient. In contrast, much of the sport and sustainability literature begins with ‘business as usual’ which philosophically steepens the uphill battle for change, i.e., how radical the questions can be. Ironically, such inefficient work tends to focus on questions of operational efficiency, far from the core of the issues. The introduction of Sport, Performance, and Sustainability gracefully bypasses this by asking,
can sportification and its associated focus on increasing performance contribute to a growing environmental impact of sports? Is there even something fundamentally problematic with the idea of sportification and the strife to be faster, higher, and stronger? (p. 9)
From these roots, the arguments grow strong though they encounter some thorny issues along the way. For example, to round off Part One, Sigmund Loland (p. 20) suggests an interpretation of “natural athletic performance” to serve as a regulative idea in shaping the rules and practices of sport. Loland argues that this idea encourages sports participants to (re)connect in deep and interactive ways with themselves as organisms and the natural world of which they are part.
There was perhaps an opportunity to contextualise mainstream Swedish sports norms relative to the global sports industry, so non-Swedish readers are clear on the limits of applying this work to sport in their own regions.
However, he is left wrestling with philosophical questions such as what is ‘natural’ and omits potential subsequent questions of practicality that came to my mind, e.g., the interest that many sports fans express to see someone do never-before-done things, regardless of technological and financial assistance. I engage in this whataboutism, not to criticise the attempt, but rather to commend Loland and the rest of the authors for wading in without fear. With the stakes of the global environmental crisis this high[1], and the relevance of sport in most cultures, no solutions with potential merit can be left unexplored. And questions like “What would [such a change in logic] do to sport as a whole, and how would it manifest in different sports?” (p. 10) are daunting to try to answer.
Part Two examines contemporary developments and potential disruptions to the prevailing performance-centric model of sport. It reviews sports across the categories of emerging, traditional, and adventure sports, which each challenge established norms in their own way. Of note, Chapter 4 provides a particularly thorough review of the philosophical underpinnings of artificial sports facilities and the link (or lack thereof) with the environment. To overcome the entanglement of logics, the authors make nimble use of the eco-strategic framework for landscape relations (Sandell, 2016), meaning-making logic within movement culture (Engström et al., 2018) and the concept of contextual sport (Millington & Wilson, 2016). This allows them to highlight issues at the individual and organisational levels and better discuss what a change in logic or meaning would mean for the future.
Chapter 5 deeply engages with the sportification model, looking at Padel in Sweden. Its more historical approach is a helpful contextualisation for readers who are unfamiliar with Padel but also justifies the choice of topic as its sportification process has happened so quickly and recently. This chapter also raised a question that may slightly query the core premise of the book, when it noted how fast Padel facilities were built and how they were funded. This observation may imply that certain stakeholders within sports see profit as the goal, and performance as one of the ways to get there, rather than the other way around as argued in the introduction.
Chapter 6 is an gripping look at the indigenous Sámi peoples, who live across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, and their sport Lassoing. It shows the contradictions between sportification and a reactionary process they call ‘indigenisation’ (p. 86). In summary, while sportification pushes Fairness/Equality, Decontextualization, Simulation and Universality, indigenisation aims for Cultural Distinctiveness, Contextualisation, Authenticity and Exclusivity. Such rebukes of the Westernised logic of sport may seem counterintuitive, but this chapter shows them to be often justified and potentially very helpful in the pursuit of sports that better align with environmentalism. A real strength of this chapter is how it extends the book’s central ideas to a world beyond sport, engaging with the legacies of colonialism and political power structures etc.

Having said that, this book is largely focused on Sweden, at least in its choice of cases. These cases are used to great effect; however, this focus is not very apparent during the introduction. There was perhaps an opportunity to contextualise mainstream Swedish sports norms relative to the global sports industry, so non-Swedish readers are clear on the limits of applying this work to sport in their own regions. For example, still in chapter 6, ‘indigenisation’ may be an appropriate term in northern Europe but decoloniality scholars, particularly with an African focus, use the same term in reference to the process of incorporating native Africans into Western systems and structures, such as Christianity (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015, p. 35). As such the ‘indigenisation’ in a different geographic context could be interpreted as the sportification of an indigenous sport, rather than a resistance to it.
The social media example chapter is a slight sidestep from the sportification model, in that not all of the criteria apply, e.g. regulation. They do still put forward the promising role that athlete ‘influencers’ (p. 33) can have, evidenced by many recent examples. I found this, however, less compelling within the context of social media, as influencer activists seem unlikely to go as ‘viral’ as many of their competitors (sportification of social media anyone?) who can reinvest the resources they gain from dubious messages/sponsors into growing their audience. The authors acknowledge that their arguments are somewhat speculative, and certainly offer a ‘better than nothing’ approach to athletes feeling frustrated by the climate crisis. It is also an area of upcoming interest across sport ecology as more athletes step forward to speak up yet risk accusations of hypocrisy, and this chapter is a welcome contribution to this theme.
Part 3 consists of two chapters on physical education and school sports, respectively, with each optimistically setting out to find how these activities can be used to encourage environmentalism. While the potential for this is established, in both chapters, the current reality is that both are used to entrench norms including the high-performance praxis of sportification and a disconnection from the environment. Indeed, Marie Larneby argues that the types of masculinities being fortified within school sport is overly focused on domination and that this has potentially negative consequences for the environment, as they carry through to the dominating masculinities in the industrialised and corporate world.
The negative outlook of these chapters could have been counteracted with a discussion of social tipping points, a phenomenon central to the broader environmental movement. While the current system works to reinforce performance above all else, if the narrative can be changed at a certain scale, the system may flip and condemn sporting logics overly focused on performance. This is evidenced in the various understandings different national school systems have, as listed by Larneby (p. 132).
In sum, there are so many important questions in this book about the logics of sports and some brilliant efforts to begin answering them. As such, it is a welcome addition to the Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society series and moves the discussion forward.
Copyright © Benjamin Mole 2024
References
Guttmann, A. (1978). From ritual to record: The nature of modern sports. Columbia University Press.
Millington, B., & Wilson, B. (2016). The greening of golf: Sport, globalization and the environment. Manchester University Press.
Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2015). Decoloniality in Africa: A continuing search for a new world order. Australasian Review of African Studies, 36(2), 22-50.
Sandell, K. (2016). Ecostrategies: Presentation and elaboration of a conceptual framework of landscape perspectives. Tourism, 64(1), 63–80.
Steffen, W., Richardson, K., Rockström, J., Cornell, S. E., Fetzer, I., Bennet, E. M., Biggs, R., Carpenter, S. R., de Vries, W., de Wit, C. A., Folke, C., Gerten, D., Heinke, J., Mace, G. M., Persson, L. M., Ramanathan, V., Reyers, B., & Sörlin, S.(2015). Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science, 347, 6223. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.12598
[1] See Planetary boundary overshoot (Steffen et al., 2015)
Table of ContentPart I: Overarching Logics and Issues: Tensions and Entanglements Between Sport, Performance, and Sustainability
Part II: Developments and Processes: Challenges to the Performance Paradigm?
Part III: Education and Sport Sustainability: Pedagogical, Social and Environmental Challenges in School Sport and Physical Education
|