ABSTRACT
Achievement-oriented sport is widely regarded as a product of the modern age or as a paradigm of modernity. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that metaphors used to describe sports are often borrowed from the world of science and technology. For example, some neo-Marxist observers have likened sports tactics to ‘spatio-temporal planning models’ (Rigauer 1993: 289) and the game of football to a ‘machine’ (Vinnai 1973). Likewise, stadia could be metaphorically described as ‘assembly lines’ for the ‘production’ of record outputs. Sports places are indeed a world of mathematics and science, precisely measured segments and territories which seek to neutralise the vagaries of nature (Bale 1993). Other metaphors for the modern sports place include ‘container’ or even ‘prison’. Indeed, Brohm regards sport as perhaps the social practice which best illustrates the disciplinary society of Michel Foucault (Brohm 1978). After all, is the stadium not an ‘enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded’ (Foucault 1979: 197)? Adopting as they do the ‘hard’, masculinised metaphors from the world of science, such readings of the stadium and other sports places present an unambiguous view of sport as anti-nature, as places of dominance.
