ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the radical critique of sport that emerged when sport became a globalized, post-industrial, professional spectacle. It explores contemporary radical criticism of sport as it developed after the 1960s, as a “fellow-traveler” in sport’s global growth and success. The chapter analyses appearance of the most quoted Marx’s metaphor “opium of people”. Radicalism is a certain attitude of modernity that demands the elimination of society, and the rebuilding of the world anew from its roots upwards. The chapter also analyzes four cases of radical criticism: Ljubodrag Simonovic, Jean-Marie Brohm, Roman Vodeb and Douglas Kellner. The radical critique of sport functions against the grain of alienation and its pleasures. In the radical critique, sport has not been seen as part of the emancipation of senses and of body, but as part of biopolitics, specifically, the exemplar of the disciplined body.
