ABSTRACT
Sport is often seen as the domain of fair play in which opportunity is said to be open to all. From such a perspective, the legacies of the values of athleticism as established in the nineteenth century – playing to the rules, honouring one's opponent, for instance – blend with the meritocratic rhetoric of modern sport. Yet throughout modern history, sport participation and its meanings have been differentiated and diverse, rooted in social inequalities and divisions. Sport has been developed and sustained in a modern society characterised by deeply embedded forms of social stratification; it is hardly surprising, therefore, that sports forms and practices are themselves indices of such differences. In this chapter we consider the primary sources of stratification in sport – social class, gender and ethnicity – in illustrative detail, and signal other sources of division in examining how social inequalities and divisions have been variously and recurrently manifest in sporting forms and practices.
