Introduction

Twenty-first century sport is a global enterprise whose ramifications reverberate far beyond the playing fields, stadia and corporate offices. The fundamentally anti-democratic and neoliberal economic foundations underpinning much of global sport development have been named and shamed during the past two decades. Today, elite sport appears more and more popular yet less and less accessible to the masses as corporate boxes and specialized event tourist packages price events beyond the means of the average citizen. As a human endeavour and commercial enterprise, sport has been inextricably linked to a broad spectrum of social, political, economic and moral trajectories. Simultaneously, some historians and many sociologists studying sport have challenged the current system demonstrating the inequalities that it produces in humanistic terms, particularly as sport has become mapped onto the human body. Sport can create hope where once there was only despair.