ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the key issues associated with representations of the sporting past under four headings: reflexivity, narrative, authorial choices, and ethics. As a prerequisite for understanding the different ways in which historians subconsciously and consciously present the past, reflexivity refers to a heightened state of self-awareness in which practitioners make continual references to their own involvement in their histories. A reflexive historian explains how they represent the past as history and the different ways they unavoidably influence their presentation of the past; the reflexive historian enters into dialogues with other viewpoints. Much of the impetus for recent perspectives and conceptualizations in the history of sport derives from a paradigmatic shift in the humanities and social sciences known as the cultural turn. The place of theory in history has been a source of endless debate within the discipline and no less so than among historians of sport and, in particular, between sport historians and sport sociologists.
