Sport & Society Research Network

Athletes Pressing Charges explores the athlete-led protest movement in the Olympic sport of modern pentathlon. The athlete activists protest against the removal of the horse-riding discipline from the sport and blame the sport’s governing body, the International Modern Pentathlon Union, for violating good governance principles and mismanagement. By taking the existing power imbalance between sport organizations and athletes as a starting point, this book argues that providing a voice to independent athletes affected by policy changes, is crucial to understand the ongoing issues in the sport.The protest movement is contextualized against the backdrop of increasingly stronger attempts by athletes from semi-professional Olympic sports to make their voices heard in decision-making processes. Therefore, this study has broader significance for the ongoing challenges by athletes and athletes-led organizations on powerful sport organizations.

Jörg Krieger is Associate Professor in Sport and Social Science at Aarhus University. He is a sport historian and the chair of Common Ground’s Sport & Society Research Network. His research interests include the history of international elite sport, sport and politics in Asia, and anti-doping.

Competition is a basic fact of life. Life in the modern world, based on rationality, ingenuity, and co-operative skills, makes it easy to forget this and to believe that it no longer applies to human beings. Developments in the western world since the turn of the millennium appear to confirm this perception. Competition, fairness, and equality in sport and society aims to show that this interpretation is wrong. Based on the workings of elite sport, it argues that the fairness and equality agenda, rather than being a manifestation of a mellowing of human nature, is essentially driven by the same innate competitive impulses. What has changed is that, once basic material needs for survival are covered, as is the case in the developed world, people continue to compete in other arenas attempting to improve their position in the human hierarchies and win status and recognition.

Verner Møller is Professor of Sport and Body Culture at the Department of Public Health, Section for Sport Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on elite sport and body cultural extremes. Throughout his career he has studied the discrepancy between sporting ideals and the reality of elite sport.

Following IOC guidance, many sports assented to a major change that uniquely affected women’s sport. Athletes may now play in the category aligned to their self-declared gender, ignoring biological sex. Thus, a paradox for women’s sport: while sport is a physical contest, biological females are now pitted against one special group of biological males, those who identify as women. Can inclusion co-exist with fairness, physical safety, and integrity in women’s sport? Is erasure of female achievements and records acceptable? Are rewards, fame, affirmative programs, and sporting careers for natal females not important? Does female sport even cease to exist? This text presents the bio-physiological-sport science research that dismantles the myth of no performance advantage of transitioned transwomen athletes. This information is essential background to assist athletes, graduate students, sports administrators, the public, and LGBT+ communities to debate this hot button issue openly and respectfully.

Helen Parker is an independent health sciences researcher, whose academic teaching and research focused on motor development, fitness and health of children and youth. She has strongly advocated for the critical role quality of physical education as the foundations for a healthy lifestyle.

Beth Hands is an Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Health Research at the University of Notre Dame Australia. For over 30 years she has investigated issues associated with motor development to better understand factors supporting the involvement of children and adolescents in physical activity and sport.

Elizabeth Rose is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Australia. publishing in the areas of Sport Psychology and Disability focusing on the importance of physical activity and sport for children and youth. Her most recent publications focus on the advancement, integrity, and safety of female sport.