I was delighted to contribute to a round table discussion organised by Sandra Meeuwsen and Yunus Tuncel in the recent International Association for the Philosophy of Sport (IAPS) online conference. Two questions were centralised: Is Covid-19 a Game Changer for Modern Sport? And if so: Can Philosophy of Sport community help guide the transition?
In the last couple of years, I worked with a concept of existential learning, using Otto Bollnow’s philosophy, with a focus on discontinuity as a potential opportunity for learning and transformation. But when we encounter discontinuity, not everyone will respond.
Did sport collectively respond to the discontinuous experience of Covid-19 by transformation? My answer is: no.
Mostly, the narrative of sport under Covid-19 has been a restitution narrative (using Arthur Frank’s typology). Something got broken, will be fixed, and things will be as they were. We just want the old normal back.
But in some ways, Covid-19 worked to make existing problems more visible, and intensified some of the already existing trends.
In this regard, 3 trends stand out.
1. Growth of inequality in modern sport. In some cases, this is a reversal of some progress that was made. We can see that the pandemic has disproportionately hit women’s sport, sport for people with disabilities, sport on lower levels, and so forth. In Finland, athletes of national and international level were allowed to continue practising last spring, whereas non-competitive and lower levels were shut down.
2. Increased medicalisation of exercise. As Dominic Malcolm and Philippa Velija noted in my interview with them in the Physical Activity Researcher Podcast, this is also linked to a growing moral pressure to stay physically active. But this in acceleration of an already existing trend and not a transformation.
3. Growth of self-organised sport. Many people shifted (or were forced to shift) to nature-based activities. Also, skateboarding became hugely popular, as Brian Glenney and Paul O´Connor mention in their interview in the Meaningful Sport podcast. But lifestyle sports have grown in popularity for a long time before Covid-19, so this is also an acceleration of a trend.
While Covid-19 does not seem to be a Game Changer, for sport there are other forces that could have a lot more profound and lasting impact.
One is about the broader sustainability crisis. It seems that we must rethink sport, like other areas of our lives, if we do not want to continue on a road towards an environmental disaster. As Prof. Gunnar Breivik, one discussants in the panel, mentioned, consumption of sports goods is going up. Can this be made in a sustainable way? And what about elite sport which demands constant travel? Do we need to reinvent sport at a very fundamental level, away from the higher-faster-stronger logic? Here, philosophy of sport community can help.
Another one is a potential transition to “a meaning-oriented society” (Vos, 2020) where a growing number of people might be moving away from self-oriented and materialistic meanings towards social and philosophical meanings. In meaningful work literature, it is seen that especially younger generation is less interested in developing a respectable and successful career and more centralising the desire to do something meaningful. And if this is indeed the case, then also here the philosophy of sport community can have an important contribution in imagining in what sport could look like in this future society.