Quite by chance I came across a marvellous book by John Bale called 'Running cultures’ which looks at running from a variety of unusual perspectives – from those of geography, time and space; and also from that of runners as ‘transgressors’ and ‘cosmopolites’. In short, it's an imaginative deconstruction of the art of putting one foot in front of the other.

 One particular section debates the interesting and controversial concept of ‘athletes as pets’. This reading is based on the humanistic-geographical writing of the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, and it considers the way in which society can force elite athletes into behaviour that is not natural to them. The coach-athlete relationship in particular is seen as a paradigm, raising issues of paternalism and control, with its inevitable imposition of discipline and conformity to the achieving of goals. Tuan suggests that this is done in much the same way as animals and children are ‘trained’.

 When taken to extremes: when diet, training, thought and personal regime become strictly regulated, the ‘natural’ body, Bales suggests, “disappears, and its ownership becomes ambiguous. The power of the coach, buttressed by medical scientists and by the ideology of achievement sport, converts the athlete into a pet”

 Athletes can easily lose ‘control’ of their bodies, sometimes in the most drastic and irretrievable of ways. A few  years ago Andreas Krieger, formerly Heidi Krieger - the 1986 women’s shot-put champion – spoke of the anabolic steroids which were given to him by East Germany’s sports officials and doctors, with the result that after his competitive career was over he had no choice but to change sex. There have been numerous other such examples driven by the same ideologies in which the athlete becomes a commodity linked to the advancement of a political creed; or bears the weight of responsibility for upholding the nation’s glory and prowess. In extreme cases he or she may be lied to about the long term effects of the latest medical wizardry; or alternately threatened or cajoled, often in very subtle, but still effective, ways. In striving for excellence the athletes are deemed to have handed themselves over to those who purport to know better.

 A healthy coach-athlete relationship is obviously key to the athlete’s well-being both in the short and the long term. Both parties must make a contract between adults, which enables each of them to freely make choices: the athlete to acknowledge training demands based on logical and informed ideas; the coach to be aware of, to listen to and answer the athlete’s needs, to treat him or her as a rational (and not an infantilised) partner. 

 Reference

John Bale

Running cultures: racing in time and space. London: Routledge, 2004

London reference collections shelfmark: YK.2006.a.18903

DS shelfmark: m04/23290