Understanding Lifestyle Sport

Consumption, Identity and Difference

Belinda Wheaton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134511877
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in the popularity of activities like skateboarding and snowboarding; sports that have been labelled as 'extreme' or 'lifestyle' and which embody 'alternative' sporting values such as anti-competitiveness, anti-regulation, high risk and personal freedom. The popularity of these activities goes beyond the teenage male youth that the media typify as their main consumers. This book examines the popularity, significance and meaning of lifestyle sport, exploring the sociological significance of these activities, particularly as related to their consumption, and the expression of politics of identity and difference.

Including much unique ethnographic research work with skaters, surfers, windsurfers, climbers, adventure racers, and ultimate frisbee players., the central themes explored in The Cultural Politics of Lifestyle Sports include:

• How might we describe lifestyle sports?
• What influence do commercial forces have on lifestyle sports?
• Do lifestyle sports challenge the hegemonic masculinities inherent in a traditional sport environment?

This book is a compelling exploration of sport as a way of life, and is a vital resource for any lecturer or student interested in Sociology and Cultural Studies in a Sports context.

1 Introduction
Mapping the lifestyle sport-scape

Belinda Wheaton

Prologue: alternative sport comes of age

Pro skateboarder Tony Hawk is standing aboard a corporate jet on his way to a charity event in Houston. In his hand is a Heineken and on the table in front of him is a platter overflowing with lobster, stone crab, and jumbo shrimp. Doing his best imitation of former Talking Heads singer David Byrne, he stiffens his frame, taps his arm, and says, “And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here”?

(Borden 2002: 1)

In May 2002 in a poll conducted by a ‘teen’ marketing firm in the USA, skateboarding star Tony Hawk was voted the ‘coolest big time athlete’ ahead of ‘mainstream’ mega-sport celebrities such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods (Layden 2002). If Jordan’s status comes even close to Nike’s claims (in 1999) that he is ‘the most recognized person in the world’ (cited in Mcdonald and Andrews 2001: 21), then alternative sport it seems, has come of age. Further evidence of the tremendous growth in alternative and extreme sports comes from participation figures; as Beal and Wilson (this volume) outline, in the USA the growth of skating, based on sales of skateboards, has outpaced the growth of a number of ‘big league’ traditional sports including baseball. Moreover, it is not just the US market that is seeing such a growth, nor is it just among young teenage men. For example, the snowboarding industry (in 1996) predicted that by 2005, half of all ski-hill patrons will be snowboarders (Humphreys 2003: 407); and in the UK, surfing became one of the fastest growth sports at the turn of the twenty-first century, particularly among women, and men in their thirties and forties (Tyler 2003; Walters 2002; Asthana 2003).

How do we make sense of this popularity in what I have termed lifestyle sport, particularly when one of the central characteristics of these so-called alternative sports is that they are different to the western traditional activities that constitute ‘mainstream’ sport?¹ As Rinehart (2000: 506) suggests, alternative sports are activities that ‘either ideologically or practically provide alternatives to mainstream sports and to mainstream sport values’. This popularity trend, or process of mainstreaming particularly as manifest in the increased media and market appropriation of alternative sport, has now received a great deal of attention from both academic and non-academic commentators on these activities. As Gliddon (2002: 1) notes:

Surfing has appeal far beyond the surfers who provide the marketing cool. There’s a surf shop in Singapore but the roughest water is the condensation on its windows. A boutique surf store competes with Chanel and Prada for the consumer waves of downtown New York.

(Gliddon cited in Arthur 2003: 162)

This commercial co-option, particularly visible in the burgeoning ‘sports style,’ is a central debate in the wider literature on lifestyle sports, and a theme running through many of the chapters that make up this collection. However I will start my discussion by explaining what lifestyle sports are, and then outlining a theoretical framework for how we can make sense of their emergence and significance in contemporary Western culture. Lastly I outline the distinctive contribution made by this collection of essays to the emerging literature on these sports and their cultures.

What are lifestyle sports?

There is now a body of academic literature examining the phenomena of what has been variously termed ‘extreme’, ‘alternative’, ‘lifestyle’, ‘whiz’, ‘action-sports’², ‘panic sport’, ‘postmodern’, ‘post-industrial’ and ‘new’ sports. Such labels encompass a wide range of mostly individualised sporting activities, from established practices like surfing and skateboarding, to new emergent activities like B.A.S.E. jumping and kite-surfing. While these labels are used synonymously by some commentators, there are differences which signal distinct emphases or expressions of the activities, characteristics that will become evident in the ensuing discussion.

The academic literature and thus ‘labelling’ of these sporting activities emerged in the early to mid 1980s with Nancy Midol’s analysis of ‘new sports’, based on what she terms the ‘whiz’ sports movement in France (Midol 1993). Midol and Broyer (1995) developing Midol’s (1993) earlier work, argue that a sporting movement developed around the ‘whiz sports’ which constitute new sport forms, and new communities based on them:

This culture is extremely different from the official one promoted by sporting institutions. The whiz sport culture is championed by avant-garde groups that challenge the unconscious defences of the existing order through which French society has defined itself for the last two centuries. These groups have dared to practice transgressive behaviours and create new values.

(Midol and Broyer 1995: 210)

In North America the idea of ‘alternative sport’ was adopted (Rinehart 1996, 1998a; Humphreys 1997; Beal 1995), although the ‘extreme’ moniker quickly became prevalent, as an all-embracing label, particularly in popular media discourse, and most significantly in the emergence of ESPN’s eXtreme Games, later renamed the X Games (see Kusz this volume).

The meaning of alternative sport has been most systematically considered by Rinehart (Rinehart and Sydor 2003; Rinehart 2000, 1998a, b). It includes an extremely wide range of activities–in fact pretty much anything that doesn’t fit under the Western ‘achievement sport’ (Eichberg 1998) rubric. Rinehart (2000: 505) lists activities ranging from indigenous folk games and ultimate fighting to jet skiing, Scuba diving, beach volleyball, and ultra marathoning, also embracing various media spectacles such as the X Games. A number of commentators have also debated whether these activities are more appropriately (or usefully) conceptualised as forms of play rather than sports (see Stranger 1999; Howe 2003), and have highlighted the importance of their artistic sensibility (Rinehart 1998b; Wheaton 2003; Howe 2003; Humphreys 2003; Booth 2003). However, to understand their meaning we need to move beyond simplistic and constraining dichotomies such as traditional versus new,³ mainstream versus emergent, or other related binaries such as sport versus art. Alternative sport, and so called ‘mainstream’ sport, can have elements of–to use Raymond Williams’s (1977) categorisation–residual, emergent and ‘dominant’ sport culture⁴ (Rinehart 2000: 506). As Rinehart suggests, the difference between, and within, these sport forms is best highlighted by a range of debates, concerning their meanings, values, statuses, identities and forms.

Despite differences in nomenclature, many commentators are agreed in seeing such activities as having presented an ‘alternative’, and potential challenge to traditional ways of ‘seeing’, ‘doing’ and understanding sport (Rinehart 1998b; Wheaton 2000a; Midol and Broyer 1995). Historically as Bourdieu (1984) has observed, many ‘new sports’ originated in North America, particularly in the late 1960s, and were then imported to Europe by American entrepreneurs (what he calls the ‘new’ and ‘petite bourgeoisie’). With their roots in the counter-cultural social movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Midol and Broyer 1995) many have characteristics that are different from the traditional rule-bound, competitive and masculinised dominant sport cultures. Maguire (1999) for example, suggests that the emergence of these sports (he cites snowboarding, hang-gliding and windsurfing) and their challenge to the achievement sport ideology is evidence of the increase in the range and diversity of sport cultures, a ‘creolization of sport cultures’ (87, 211). Bale (1994), likewise submits that such activities present a challenge to the ‘western sport model’.

Lifestyle sport is less all-embracing than the terms alternative or new sport; and although many lifestyle sports are often called extreme sport, the latter tends to be the way the mainstream media and marketers, rather than the participants themselves see them (Sky 2001).⁵ As Rinehart (2000: 508) notes:

Some practitioners–and writers–have disputed the very term ‘extreme’ as merely a blatant and cynical attempt to capitalize on a wave of oppositional sports forms, and, by doing so, for corporations such as ESPN to appropriate trendy oppositional forms.

This is not to suggest that the media are not central to understanding the experience or cultural significance of lifestyle sports. Rinehart makes a convincing case for the increasing influence of the electronic media in determining the shape of what he calls the ‘alternative sportscape’ (Rinehart 2000). Lifestyle sports take many shapes, including at the elite level being part of the landscape of ‘traditional’ sports (witness snowboarding in the Olympic Games), the X-Games (activities include a range of board sports including skating, snowboarding, and sport climbing–see Rinehart, 2000), and increasingly as a marketing tool for advertisers attracting youth audiences. Nevertheless underpinning these forms are lived cultures that are fundamentally about ‘doing it’, about taking part. Participation takes place in local subcultural spaces, spaces that are often quite ‘liminal’ (Shields 1992) lacking regulation and control, and the sports are performed in ways that often denounce–or even resist–institutionalisation, regulation and commercialisation.

Moreover, more important than classification is their meaning (Rinehart 2000). I use the term lifestyle sport as it is an expression adopted by members of the cultures themselves, and one that encapsulates these cultures and their identities, signalling the importance of the socio-historical context in which these activities emerged, took shape and exist. As I will exemplify, ‘lifestyle sport’ reflects both the characteristics of these activities, and their wider socio-cultural significance.

‘It’s a lifestyle thang’

In a radio interview in the USA (2002) Jake Burton, a key individual in snowboarding’s history,⁶ is asked about whether there was any ‘agreed-upon definition of ‘extreme sport,’ or whether, it was ‘somewhat in the eye of the beholder’?

It doesn’t have to be an extreme sport at all. There’s a lot of people that, you know, snowboard in a fairly conservative manner. But I think what’s a better moniker is maybe that it’s a lifestyle sport, and a lot of the kids and people that are doing it are just completely living it all the time, and that’s what distinguishes snowboarding from a lot of other sports. And skateboarding and surfing are the same way. And I’m not sure why that is unique to board sports, but I think the only thing that you can come back to is that they’re so much fun.

(Jake Burton 2002, emphasis added)

Similarly in my research on windsurfing, and in a range of other activities (Sky 2001), participants described the activity ‘as a lifestyle’ rather than a sport. It became evident that a particular style of life was central to the meaning and experience of windsurfing. Participants sought out a lifestyle that was distinctive, often alternative, and that gave them a particular and exclusive social identity. While this is particularly evident in board sports such as skating, surfing, and snowboarding, authors in this collection, and elsewhere, have charted the importance of lifestyle in other new sport activities such as climbing (Lewis this volume; Robinson this volume; Kiewa 2002) adventure racing (Kay and Laberge this volume) and Ultimate Frisbee (Thornton this volume). Like other ‘alternative lifestyle’ groupings that have emerged from the counter culture these sporting cultures involve locally situated identity politics and lifestyle practices (Hetherington 1988: 3).

In the emergence of these sports and their associated lifestyles, we can see some of the central issues and paradoxes of advanced capitalist or late-modern societies, such as in the changing expression of self-identity, and the individualisation and privatisation of the act of consumption, even in seemingly public spheres (Philips and Tomlinson 1992). Theories about the de-stabilisation of social categories, and the increased fluidity of social relationships have triggered interest in the conception of more ‘fragmented identities’ (Bradley 1996; Hall and Du Gay 1996). As Kellner (1992) outlines, whereas in traditional society identity was relatively fixed and stable (based on a range of identifiers such as work, gender, ethnicity, religion, age), in late modernity, ‘identity becomes more mobile, multiple, personal, self-reflexive, and subject to exchange and innovation’ (141). It is argued that with the acceleration of change and increasing cultural complexity, the possibilities of different sources of identification have expanded, in particular the increased significance of consumption practices such as sport and leisure lifestyles in the communication and maintenance of self-identity for growing segments of the population (Chaney 1996; Lury 1996; Bocock 1993). Many of these commentators suggest that the relationship between class and identity has shifted;⁷ for some like Bauman (1992) lifestyle has overshadowed ‘class’ as the social relations of production. Maffesoli (1996) describes the emergence of neo-tribes, collectivities based around new types of identification and interests such as alternative lifestyles, youth ‘subcultures’ and sporting interests, but that are more fluid in composition than subcultures, and that are not determined by one’s class background.⁸

The close relationship between identity and consumption has become a key indicator for examining the changing social terrain in late-modern/postmodern society (Hetherington 1988).⁹ Consumer culture presents us with an array of lifestyles to aspire to, manifest in a range of symbols including the leisure and sporting activities we pursue, and signifying self-expression and individuality (Tomlinson 1990). ‘Leisure is particularly germane to consumption because it displays so many of the characteristics of consumer culture’ (Chaney 1994: 78). These:

new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions they design together into a lifestyle.

(Featherstone 1991: 86)

The emphasis is increasingly ‘on choice, differentiation,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Routledge Critical Studies in Sport
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Mapping the lifestyle sport-scape
• Part I: Commercialisation: Culture, identity and change
• Part II: Ambivalent masculinities: Identity and difference