ABSTRACT

Writing in the late 1970s, the Marxist physical educationalist, Jean-Marie Brohm, argued that sport in ‘bourgeois capitalist societies’ had become a ‘prison of measured time’ (Brohm 1978). By this he meant that, under capitalism, sport has developed in such a way that it has come, for elite athletes, to represent constraint rather than freedom, with the removal of all creative spontaneity and playful impulses, characterized by the sterile worship of the stop-watch. Sport was, he argued, ‘one of the strongest factors removing the element of play from bodily activity’ (Brohm 1978: 41) and he cited his fellow French writer, Ellul, to the effect that we ‘are witnessing a process whereby playfulness and joy … improvisation and spontaneity are disappearing: all these things are abandoned in favour of obedience to strict rules, efficiency and record times’ (Ellul, cited in Brohm 1978: 41).