Abstract
This chapter engages with the question of the future of sport in an age of pandemics, anthropogenic environmental destruction, and undeterred global capitalism. We contend that, despite the widespread disruption of the sport industry during the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry remains dominated by a neoliberal model of sport that is anthropocentric and fixated on capital accumulation, market efficiencies, and economic growth. The existential crisis of the Anthropocene not only calls into question the sustainability of neoliberal, growth-oriented sporting models, but also underscores the need to understand and valorize the potentially ecological and non-anthropocentric dimensions of what the late scholar Brian Pronger termed “post-sport” physical cultures. The chapter revisits existing literature on post-sport, exploring its significance as a way of both highlighting and imagining forms of physical culture that could be potentially more pleasurable and ecologically sustainable than contemporary neoliberal sport.
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Clevenger, S.M., Rick, O.J.C., Bustad, J.J. (2023). COVID-19, the Anthropocene, and the Need for Post-Sport. In: Andrews, D.L., Thorpe, H., Newman, J.I. (eds) Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times . Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14387-8_22
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