Praxis of ideological and political resistance to “capitalist sport”

Abstract

This paper synthesizes the main ideas of the Critical Theory of Sport, which has investigated the meanings of sport in capitalism since the late 1960s in France.
The first section argues that sport is integrated into the capitalist development and contributes to convey the values of the industrial bourgeoisie since the end
of the 19th century. In sports, competitiveness, the myth of struggle, triumph and success are staged. At the same time, sports constitute a training, a vehicle, for
performance and productivity at work. That section also discusses the different negative effects of sport in contemporary capitalism, which have been analyzed
by the Critical Theory of Sport: from violence to machismo, from the corruption of sports institutions to the commercialization and spectacularization of sport,
which is understood as a mechanism for distraction. The final section proposes a typology of attitudes of sports actors that legitimize and maintain the aforementioned
negative effects of sport in the framework of current capitalism