Unsettling Sporting Stories

Abstract

It is a daunting privilege to be invited to contribute to this vital conversation. I am writing this on the stolen Lands of the Marin-balluk clan of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Like all the Lands that make up what is now a nation named Australia, they have never been ceded. The serious play of sport is all around me. People walk, run, and cycle on the Kororoit creek near my home, adults and kids play rugby union at the Arthur Beachley reserve across the street, and many of the television screens on show through my neighborhood broadcast the men’s Australian Football League competition and the 2022 Commonwealth Games, which are taking place in Birmingham, England. Across the Pacific Ocean, the men’s Major League Baseball competition continues as summer turns to fall in North America, and overnight the English “Lionesses” defeated Germany at a sold out Wembley stadium in London. After the victory, the English coach, Sarina Wiegman, proclaimed that “the world will change” for her players now that they havewon the 2022 Euro. Although just how much their worlds will change is unclear, the statement rings true. Such is the power of sport. The outcome of one game can transform lives. The recent compelling editorial by Carly Adams—“‘Home’ to Some, But Not to Others”—interrogates the academic structures that continue to enact systemic violence on those who are not privileged byWhiteness with its unequal hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and physical bodies among other things. What I want to draw attention to here is the particularities of “modern” sport and how we tell sporting history, which I think lend a distinctive urgency to redressing these systems of discrimination, exclusion, and other forms of violence. Sport is arguably the most powerful of all the forms of popular culture in places like Australia and Canada. The extraordinary meaning that it holds for so many people is both absurd and deep. Sports are a site of dreams, desires, passions, spectacular athleticism, multibillion dollar industries, and above all, of compelling stories that unfold as we watch and play. It is these sporting stories—as lived by athletes, fans, and many others—that shape, and at times transform, lives. Yet, if we focus narrowly on these stories as sports historians, on who won and lost, of how sporting competitions were developed, and of who played in them, then we risk compounding the devastating role that sports frequently play in the world. Modern sports are the product of a world driven by ideologies of White supremacy and processes of genocidal colonization. As part of this modern world,