’Team GB’ and London 2012: The Paradox of National and Global Identities

This article explores the problems associated with ’national identity’ in the UK and examines the tensions arising between the international and local dimensions of the games through examples of domestic (UK) and international (Brazil, Chicago) media coverage of the key debates relating to London’s period of preparation. The chapter proposes a conception of London 2012 as exemplar of an event poised to generate insights and experiences connected to a new politics of ’cosmopolitan’ identity; insights central to grasping the cultural politics of contemporary urban development-and the paradoxes of national identity in current discourses of Olympism. Properly speaking, cosmopolitanism suits those people who have no country, while internationalism should be the state of mind of those who love their country above all, who seek to draw to it the friendship of foreigners by professing for the countries of those foreigners an intelligent and enlightened sympathy. © 2010 Taylor & Francis

Bricoleurs Extraordinaire: Sports Coaches in Inter War Britain

In Inter War Britain, individuals exploited their athletic skills by pursuing professional careers, or adopting amateur roles, as instructors, trainers and coaches, invariably drawing from, and elaborating on, existing practices. The coach was the master of a body of specialist craft knowledge, the tacit nature of which was transmitted through ‘stealing with the eyes’ as the apprentice watched the master in action (Gamble, 2001). Professional coaches saw themselves as practical men whose experiential knowledge concerning diet, physiological and psychological preparation, stimulants, massaging, medical treatments, talent identification, and so on provided critical components in their coaching ‘toolbox’ (Nelson, 1924, 25-26). Craft knowledge was never static. Coaching expertise is a fluid, cyclical process with practitioners continuously redeveloping their competencies (Turner, Nelson and Potrac, 2012, 323), and part of traditional craft expertise was the ability to react positively to shifting circumstances. Coaches were constantly stimulated to experiment by competitors, commercialisation, and emerging technologies (Clegg, 1977, 244), and they exemplified the notion of the ‘Bricoleur’ in constantly trialling emerging knowledge, intuitively accepting or rejecting appropriate material. This paper explores the ways in which practitioners developed their coaching ‘toolbox’ in Inter War Britain by drawing on examples from newspaper reports, personal and public archives, and instructional texts (eg. Tilden, 1920; Gent, 1922; Nelson, 1924; Mussabini, 1926; Lowe and Porritt, 1929; Abrahams and Abrahams, 1936). The author highlights the range of knowledge that coaches had at their command, well before the emergence of sports science and coaching certification programmes, and questions assumptions that coaches can no longer rely solely on ‘learning the trade’ through experience (Evans and Light, 2007). As Winchester et al. (2013) have emphasised, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and insights are developed from daily experiences in sport, work and at home, as well as through exposure to the coaching environment, and contemporary coaches still employ a largely implicit form of knowledge, closely connected to past experiences, which shares similarities with Inter War craft knowledge (Smith and Cushion, 2006, 363; Jones, Armour and Potrac, 2003), while identifying experimentation and experience as key reference points (Irwin, Hanton and Kerwin, 2004, 436, 439; Potrac, Jones and Cushion, 2007)

Pierre de Coubertin. Il progetto politico dell'olimpismo

Se gli sport inglesi affermatisi nel XIX secolo, sono segnati da un tratto privatistico, espressione come sono della naturale evoluzione della morfologia sociale, del protagonismo della società civile, l’olimpismo teorizzato da Pierre de Coubertin, segnato dall’ansia di coinvolgere le strutture dello Stato, di inserire l’atletismo come punto qualificante di una nuova concezione degli equilibri sociali, si affermerà, e la sua diffusione sarà travolgente, grazie alla sua caratteristica più innovativa, quella di presentarsi come un vero e proprio, complessivo, progetto politico