ABSTRACT
Using sport to search for the hero inside of us appears to be part of the quest for exciting significance (Maguire et al. 2002). In this chapter, however, I seek to highlight two questions posed by Hoberman (1988, p. 325): ‘Why has the world chosen as its predominant physical culture competitive sport rather than expressional dance?’; and ‘What makes the modern body an efficiently performing body rather than a different sort of body?’ An answer to the first question can be gained from tracing the emergence and diffusion of global sport (Maguire, 1999) and, in this connection, several key processes highlight how this ‘choice’ of competitive sport was highly structured (Maguire et al. 2002). Unless this choice is challenged, body cultures will remain locked in the iron cage of modern achievement sport. As to the second question, an examination of what I term the sports-industrial complex reveals the emergence and implications of the efficient body as the predominant corporeal form. Whatever merit this sportive culture has, it has come at the cost of a loss of other body cultures and a marginalisation of alternative views of physical education and sports science (Crum, 1999).
