Sporting Times

K. Woodward

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137275356
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275363
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Written against the backdrop of the 2012 London Olympics, this book examines the idea of 'time' in sport, using time as a conceptual lens to explore movement, bodies, sports reporting, memory, disability, technology and the role of the past and the future in sport.

1

Out of the Blocks: Starting Times

Abstract: Chapter 1 sets the agenda for the discussion in the book by raising questions about the primacy of time and temporality in sport, about which times matter and about how time matters. This chapter poses some of the questions which are explored in the book by suggesting that sport is in some ways a distinctive field of inquiry but one in which a discussion of time and the conceptualisation of temporality have theoretical importance and resonance across a wide range of social and cultural areas. The immediacy of sport and its immersion in the ‘now’ generates ways of thinking about the relationships between past, present and future.

Woodward, Kath. Sporting Times. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137275363.

We live in sporting times, not least at the time of writing, in the year of the 2012 Olympic Games and a whole range of other mega sporting spectacles including the men’s football European championships, cricket test series as well as all the other regular international competitions, such as Wimbledon, the US Open, the Ryder Cup and golf majors, the NFL Superbowl, basketball and baseball competitions to mention but a few. However, the Olympics, being the biggest and the ‘greatest show on earth’, is the trigger for this book which explores time in sport and sporting times in order to see what sport can offer to an understanding of time and temporality.

In the UK, especially, 2012 is the year of sporting times not only because this is the year that the games came to London but also because the Olympics and the Paralympics have generated excitement and massive interest, and the athletes who have taken part have become heroic figures in the public arena. It has all worked way beyond the dreams of the organisers and the scepticism of many critics and political activists. The legacy of the games remains uncertain but the duration of the events, that is the real time when it has all been happening, has been an undisputed success in delivering wide engagement and spectacular support, beyond the sale of tickets and interest of sports fans. It is difficult to describe the intensities of the moment without resorting to the familiar hyperbole of sports’ commentary with its rhetoric of amazement and disbelief. Each athlete in the post-event interview declared that the experience had been incredible, amazing or unbelievable, or even all three. Superlatives are limited – why not? What else could anyone say? The experience, representation and expression of London 2012 have been remarkable in its democratic reach and the engagement even of sceptics as well as the expected spectacles of the display. The Paralympics and its athletes have generated as much interest and support as has the Olympics which preceded them; the so-often socially inflected embodied differences have become ordinary and pass unremarked. What matters is playing the game. The measure of sporting achievement has been through embodied activities in the field, in the ring, on the track and in the pool in a convivial mix of people who have in common athletic capabilities. The year 2012 has demonstrated well Paul Gilroy’s concept of conviviality (Gilroy, 2004) not only in its mixture of democratic participation with the endurance of inequalities, not least the economic differences between the countries participating in the games, but also in the balance between the negative and the positive dimensions of conviviality. London 2012 has offered a celebration of the ordinariness of many of the differences between and among people and downplayed the markers of inequality (Stewart, 2007).This is not to say that the games themselves were not marked by inequalities, which also operated routinely (Unequal Time, Cleaners, 2012).

One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the ordinariness of differences, which makes for social inclusion for me in 2012, is the women’s boxing with Nicola Adams’s wonderful achievement, not ‘just’ in winning gold but for making women’s boxing ordinary as well as spectacular; her great performance in the ring was assessed by the same criteria as a professional men’s heavyweight fight in Madison Square Garden. Her speed and agility is resonant of Muhammad Ali’s in his prime, as was recognised in the reporting and commentary. What matters is that women’s boxing is taken seriously; Adams’ skill was acknowledged and not subjected to the trivialisation or sexualisation which so often marks any discussion of women’s boxing. This was categorised as indicative of 2012 being ‘women’s time’ or more usually ‘girls’ time’. The discourse of time includes notions of ‘the right time’, his or her time or even our time when referring to team GB in the partisan world of sports reporting and in the UK press and BBC commentary. Women’s participation and achievement is ordinary in this respect even though the performance in this case, as in so many other instances in 2012, was spectacular and executed with stunning levels of skill and competence, speed and agility. The sport made it spectacular, not the enactment by someone from a marginalised or socially excluded group.

This book, Sporting Times, uses the games and the experiences of ‘being in time’ in these days of sporting wonder to develop some understanding of what is distinctive about how time is lived and played out in sport and how temporality in this context contributes to a wider understanding. Chapter 1 sets the agenda for the discussion in the book by raising questions about the primacy of time and temporality in sport, about which times matter and about how time matters. Sport is often classified as a leisure time activity in its routine enactments and spectatorship. It is time marked-off from employment and paid work, although for many people sport is paid work, not only for professional athletes but also for the huge number of people involved in sports industries, such as support systems and the media: for them sport is working time. However, times and the allocation and availability of time are unequally distributed. Some sports take a long time; some people do not have the time. Sport is all about measurement of time, whether in the setting of records, measurements of embodied practices or in the memories of past achievements and failures through which sporting identifications are made.

Time also means immediacy in sport (Rowe, 2008) as records of ‘best time’, ‘personal best’ and the ‘right time’ make for success and reward, whether gained by financial rewards or through personal satisfaction and achievement. Success is condensed into a moment such as at the point of crossing the winning line first or beating a record. Success is measured by achieving a place in history. When British athlete Mo Farah added the gold of the 5,000m to his 10,000m gold medals he was called ‘The History Man’ as he is only the seventh man in history to have won gold in both competitions (Greenslade, 2012). Time, especially the rapid completion of a task, makes history, that is, the inclusion of timed records into recorded historical time. This is why through a dialogue with the past, which informs our understandings of the present, both past and present are projected into the future. As Eviatar Zerubavel argues, to make sense of now we need to understand how we envision the past (Zerubavel, 2004) because the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of where we are now are constructed in the present.

In sport, history takes shape through memory in specific ways, but is nonetheless as political and imbued with inequalities as well as opportunities as the more explicitly controversial elements of Zerubavel’s time maps, which demonstrate the particularities of memory in different spatial contexts. The Olympics bring together over 204 nations across the world in a global mix which maps out new territories and also carries the distinguishing characteristics of the nation states and their histories.

Sport is not only about play; nor are sporting times only records of embodied performances on the track, in the field, in the ring or pool. How sporting histories are organised into coherent stories is both informative and political. Time metaphors as well as the measurement of time play key roles in the evaluation of sport and commentary.

The experience of time is characterised by inevitability and the forces of finitude which characterise organic life and have so concerned humanity as integral to the human condition. The time stories and myths which Barbara Adam recounts are often constructed around human attempts to counter the ravages of time and of death as the inevitable end point of life (Adam, 1990, 1995, 2004, Dreyfus, 1875). Newtonian physics suggests that time flows uniformly without reference to anything else (Newton, 1995 [1686–7]), but perception of time and how time is experienced are clearly social too. Sporting practices are also directed at overcoming some of the limitations of the flesh and the inevitable process of aging. Sport’s histories, myths and legends express the endeavours and successes, on occasion, of overcoming some of the constraints of time and flesh and the inextricable interconnections of bodies in time with time.

The concept of time is central to sport, its cultures and practices. Sporting Times was the title of a newspaper published from 1865 to 1932, devoted to sports, mainly horse racing – a particularly important sport at the time – which reflected both the relevance and the pleasures of sporting times and the time spent in sport. Sporting times are the times we live in and the media play a key role in this, but there is much more to sporting time and times. Sport is an empirical field which offers particular insights into understanding temporality because of sports’ mix of infrastructures of power with strong personal and collective feelings and attachments, all of which are entangled in the immediacy of now. This book uses sport as a focus for the exploration of the conceptualisation of temporality not only by considering the range of ways in which time is important in sport but also by looking at connections and disruptions between these different times. Thus the book aims to:

unpack time and times as taken-for-granted but under-researched features of sport;

offer some evaluation and exploration of theoretical approaches to temporality, some of which have been developed in feminist work on temporality and community and the promise of changing times, in relation to temporalities in sport;

bring together different dimensions of sport which are under-represented in the literature of sport in order to demonstrate how inequalities and opportunities have temporal as well as material spatial dimensions;

provide an engaging and accessible approach which uses what is particular to sport as well as how sport is part of the wider social-cultural field to draw attention to the politics and culture of time in sport and sporting times;

provide new ways of thinking about the social and political importance of time through an innovative methodology which relates present, past and future through the process of writing in ‘real time’, during the Olympics 2012.

‘Real time’ – now

I am writing this book in August and September 2012 in ‘real time’; a statement which has attracted cries of derision from some scholarly colleagues. What is ‘real time’? The very label suggests an authenticity that any serious studies of temporalities would challenge. Writing in ‘real time’ means writing while watching and is feasible only when watching at a distance and when it necessarily involves some reflection. What is written during the event is like memory re-worked in the writing up through processes of review and editing. It would be difficult to write anything at all during the 100 metres, usually in barely 10 seconds, and it was. I did however try. Time is experience and time is experienced (Adam, 1994) and in this instance my application of ‘real time’ is an endeavour to capture the intensities of sporting time and times by watching, writing and reflecting during the time span of the Olympics and Paralympics 2012. The suggestion that temporal being (Adam, 1990, 1995, 2004) in this context could be ‘real time’ invokes some of the possibilities of the iterative and contemporaneous capacities of time. These processes are highlighted by the contradictory nature of the flow of time and the connections and disjunctions between perception and the material objects of perception (Adam, 2004, Hegel (1970 [1840]), Merleau-Ponty, 1968, Zerubavel, 1981).

Writing in ‘real time’ is a dialogic process in which the experience of time and its affects and sensations are paramount, none more so than in sport. ‘Real time’ means I too, just like the athletes competing in the games, am writing to the clock: ‘real time’ has deadlines for authors. ‘Real time’ includes clock time with intricate and ever more precise mechanisms and technologies of measurement (Frank, 2011). Measured clock time in sport is explicit and visible as an outcome rather than concealed or assumed in the rhythms of temporality (Zerubavel, 1981, 1985). The precise measurement of time is, however, only one strand in ‘real time’ and in sporting times (Adam, 2004).

‘Real time’ is now but now necessarily draws upon what is past and is projected into the future. What I write now is meaningful only in relation to the past. In sporting terms, for example, records are broken only because they exceed earlier recorded achievements. Now becomes then and what is written now is communicated in the future. By the time this book is published, some records set at the London games may have been broken and set again. It will, of course, be some time before the much vaunted legacy of the Olympic Games could be realised. In this instance, time remains vague and it is not clear at what point any assessment could be made. An evaluation of legacy requires time for reflection and, of course, what is now becomes what has past and there has to be an assessment of the achievements (or failure to achieve) during the intervening years and of what endures over time, however inexact the period of time may actually be. In the contemporary world, time demands attention which means measurement, or at least we think it does. As Barbara Adam argues, modern times are not lived in accordance with the seasons (Adam, 2004) but as quantifiable units. If time is limited, which is a mantra of contemporary life where being too busy to stop and think is a sine qua non of being wanted and being successful and of being in time and tune with the times, we have to manage time; time management is a recognised skill and one which can be taught and learned. Sport as play, despite being all about speed and measuring time and creating new records which are even faster than the last, does offer some time out. Another aspect of temporality in contemporary life is its associations not only with pressure but also with risk and insecurity (Giddens, 1989, 1990).

Writing this book during the 2012 games means that I am immersed in the ebb and flow of the intensities and experiences of time and its routine and irregular rhythms. The intensity of the moment and the spontaneity of feeling are characteristics of sport, sport attachments and spectatorship. The experience highlights the association between time and the experiential which characterise phenomenological accounts (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1968, 1970). These are experiences which raise questions about how time and experience are enmeshed and about the centrality of time in configuring experience. Temporalities also call into question some of the claims of phenomenology and, methodologically, especially the prioritising of the experiential as a means of explaining the importance of time in sport which Merleau-Ponty acknowledges in his later work (Merleau-Ponty, 1968).

Just as athletes have to pace themselves, so do spectators, followers, commentators and analysts. Time, affect, emotion and energy are entangled in the event and the experience; the movement of time also contributes to the generation of excitement. It is not only the breathlessness of physical exertion which evidences the effort and exhilaration of sporting activity. Time and its demands and pressures also create the anticipation and aspiration before the activity and in its duration and in many cases the whole embodied enterprise is directed at meeting the challenge of time. Sporting activities are tiring for all who are involved. Just as the energy of the athlete is finite, so too might be the enthusiasm of the spectators and followers. All are caught up in the temporal processes of the event, albeit in different ways, with differentially weighted corporeal involvement and competences. What is common to all is the operation of time. Time is what makes excitement possible, but heightened engagement can be sustained only for a limited period of time. In 2012, however, there seems to have been no reduction of commitment and enthusiasm for the games as the Paralympics followed the Olympics.

Would we be able to sustain this level of enthusiasm for much longer? The media apparatuses which communicate and transmit the embodied practices, routines, spectacles and rituals of sport cannot be financed for limitless periods of time. Is it the passage of time which creates exhaustion and enthusiasm fatigue among spectators or is it the excess of hyperbole and the volubility of sports commentary and media coverage? In the case of the BBC coverage of the 2012 summer games, the explosion of actions, activities and events described as ‘amazing’, ‘incredible’ or ‘unbelievable’, in a manner that is not atypical of contemporary sports journalism itself, calls into question how ‘unb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1  Out of the Blocks: Starting Times
• 2  Time and Motion: Methodologies and Methods
• 3  Memories
• 4  Measuring Time
• 5  Future Time
• 6  Changing Times and Changing Time
• References
• Index