ABSTRACT
The links between sport and education, sport and prevention, and sport and insertion are considered to be self-evident and are rarely analysed or questioned. Political discourse and collective representations consider what is in fact cultural, to be natural. The laudatory representations linked to sport are the result of a slow and progressive social construction, a mixture of the legacy of the morale of the warrior in the Middle Ages, the Coubertin ideal, which is centred on sport education and the Olympic ideal as the universal and almost divine space for purification through sport. There are a number of deep-rooted beliefs in the pacifying functions linked to modern sports. The school of sociology, which is critical of sport, indicating that sport was the theatre of many deviations and carriers of internal and external political functions. By proposing 'sport' as an 'immediate antidote to violence in the housing projects', the absence of reasoning was flagrant. The sport in question was mainly self-organised.
