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Power and Performance Versus Pleasure and Participation

Different Sports, Different Experiences, Different Consequences

Jay Coakley, (2003), Sports in Society: Issues and Controversies (8 th Ed) , pp 110-112, Champaign IL : Human Kinetics Publishers.

Sport experiences vary with the conditions under which sports are organized and played. To assume that all sports are organized around the same goals and emphasize the same orientations and behaviors is a mistake. In North America , for example, there are highly organized competitive sports, informal sports, adventure sports, recreational sports, extreme sports, alternative sports, cooperative sports, folk sports, contact sports, artistic sports, team sports, individual sports, and so on, and there are various combinations of these types. However, at this time, it seems that the dominant sport form in many societies is organized around what I will call a power and performance model .

Power and performance sports are highly organized and competitive. Generally, they emphasize the following:

• The use of strength, speed, and power to push human limits and aggressively dominate opponents in the quest for victories and championships
• The idea that excellence is proved through competitive success and achieved through intense dedication and hard work, combined with making sacrifices, risking one's personal well-being, and playing in pain
• The importance of setting records, defining the body as a machine, and using technology to control and monitor the body
• Selection systems based on physical skills and competitive success
• Hierarchical authority structures, in which athletes are subordinate to coaches and coaches are subordinate to owners and administrators
• Antagonism to the point that opponents are defined as enemies

Of course, becoming involved in and playing sports with these characteristics would be different from becoming involved in and playing sports with other characteristics.

Although power and performance sports have become the standard for determining what sports should be in many countries, they have not been accepted by everyone. In fact, some people have maintained or developed other forms of sports grounded in a wide range of values and experiences. Some of these are revisions of dominant forms, whereas others represent alternative or even oppositional sport forms. These alternative and oppositional forms are diverse, but many fit what I will call a pleasure and participation model.

Pleasure and participation sports represent a diverse collection of physical activities, but they generally emphasize the following:

• Active participation revolving around a combination of types of connections – connections between people, between mind and body, and between physical activity and the environment
• An ethic of personal expression, enjoyment, growth, good health, and mutual concern and support for teammates and opponents
• Empowerment (not power) created by experiencing the body as a source of pleasure and well-being
• Inclusive participation based on an accommodation of differences in physical skills
• Democratic decision-making structures characterized by cooperation, the sharing of power, and give-and-take relationships between coaches and athletes
• Interpersonal support around the idea of competing with, not against, others; opponents are not enemies but those who test each other

These two sport forms do not encompass all the ways that sport might be organized and played. In fact, some people play sports that contain elements of both forms and reflect many ideas about what is important in physical activities. However, power and performance sports remain dominant today in the sense that they receive the most attention and support. When people play or watch these sports, their experiences are different than when they play or watch pleasure and participation sports. Not all sports are the same when it comes to socialization.

Why are power and performance sports dominant today? Using critical theories, the answer to this question is that sports are parts of culture, and people with power and resources usually want sports in their cultures to be organized and played in ways that promote their interests. They want sports to fit with how they see the world. They want sports to celebrate the relationships, orientations, and values that will reproduce their privileged positions in society. Today, power and performance sports fit the interests of people with power and resources.

Powerful and wealthy people in societies around the world maintain their privileged positions through many means. Some use coercive strategies through their control of military force, but most use cultural strategies designed to create the belief that power and wealth are distributed in legitimate and acceptable ways in society. For example, in countries with monarchies, the privilege of the royal family usually is explained in terms of birthright. The monarchies exist as long as people in the society believe that birthrights represent legitimate claims to wealth and power. This is why the church and state have been so close in societies with monarchies – kings and queens have used their association with powerful external forces, such as God or gods, to legitimize their power and wealth.

In democratic countries, most people use merit as a standard when judging whether power and wealth are legitimate. Thus, power and wealth in democracies can be maintained only when most people believe that rewards go to those who have earned them. When there is widespread inequality in a democratic society, those with power and wealth must promote the idea that they have earned their privileged positions through intelligence and hard work and that poverty and powerlessness are the result of a lack of intelligence and hard work. One way to promote this idea is to emphasize competition as a natural part of social life and as a fair means of determining who gets what in the society. If people believe this, then they will believe that those with power and wealth deserve what they have.

This connection between power relations and an emphasis on competition helps us understand why power and performance sports are so widely promoted and supported in North America and in many countries around the world today. These sports are based on a class ideology that celebrates winners and idealizes the domination of some people over others. These sports also promote the ideas that the only fair and natural way to distribute rewards is though competition and that those with the most power and wealth deserve more than what other people have because they have competed successfully – they are winners.

This is how power and performance sports have come to be dominant in democratic societies in which there are extensive inequalities among people. In fact, the global expansion of these sports is based on similar factors. Powerful and wealthy transnational corporations spend billions of dollars annually on the sponsorship of power and performance sports because they should involve competition. They want people to agree that rewards should go to winners, that the winners deserve power and wealth, and that the ranking of people on the basis of power and wealth is not only fair but natural. In other words, their sponsorships are based on concerns about ideology as well as financial profits that might e generated by sports.

Pleasure and participation sports, as well as other sport forms that challenge or oppose the ideology that underlies power and performance sports, may be popular among some people, but they generally do not receive sponsorships and support from those with power and wealth in democratic societies. In fact, sponsorships and support go primarily to forms of alternative sports that have been converted to fit the power and performance model. When ESPN created the XGames, its goal was to represent alternative sport forms in a power and performance model that fits the interests of wealthy corporate sponsors, not the interests of participants and spectators. What do you think?

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