Journal of Sport and Social Issues

Drawing on interviews with 25 athletes with disabilities and para-sport participants (coaches, volunteers, and supporters), and on posts and comments made on a multi-authored blog discussing Paralympic sport, this article addresses how individuals advocate on behalf of disability sport. Our findings indicate that athletes and their allies adopt different styles of advocacy ranging in tone from more congenial (honey) to more confrontational (vinegar). In selecting what strategy to employ, advocates take into consideration their assessment of the perceived effectiveness of the strategy as well as the potential for backlash. We discuss our findings in light of Stake and Rosu’s definition of advocacy as a “fundamental act of human being” and within the context of the historically tumultuous relationship between disability rights advocacy and elite sport systems.

The inclusion of athletes with a disability into the Olympic Games has been a long-standing issue within the Paralympic Movement. This article reviews the history of including athletes with a disability into the Olympic Games using two frameworks, the Critical Change Factors Model (CCFM) and its companion, the Organizational Continuum for the Inclusion of Identity Groups in Sport (OCIIS). The CCFM and OCIIS were developed by Fay, grounded in critical social, principal–agent, and open systems theories. Last, the authors identify five future scenarios noting where they would fit within the two frameworks.

This article relates the Australian and New Zealand women’s artistic gymnastics governance systems to the micro-level conduct of coaches, gymnasts, and parents. Two ethnographic studies conducted in these countries examined how gymnasts, parents, and coaches reacted to and produced training realities. We employ a Foucauldian perspective of consumption to analyze the data. The results demonstrate different types of consumer mentalities. In Australia, where governance is driven by pressure to return investment, coaches, gymnasts, and parents disciplined their selves and consumption to fulfill prescribed expectations. In New Zealand, where gymnastics does not receive financial support and thus the National Sporting Organisation cannot prescribe particular performance results, gymnasts and parents negotiated their consumption.

Relatively little scholarly attention has been given to the theoretical and epistemological assumptions through which food and eating are implicated as vehicles to reproduce the athletic body. The purpose of this research note is to consider potential avenues for critical inquiry into the connections between food, sport, and athletic performance. More specifically, we will investigate the relationships of food to understandings of performance-enhancing technologies. While these studies tend to focus their attention on how certain substances and practices become classified as illicit or unnatural, we argue that much can be learned by examining the other side of this binary opposition and by considering why certain substances and practices are firmly positioned outside the realm of performance enhancers. We highlight food and eating as especially fruitful sites for this type of analysis and interrogate how food is firmly positioned as unquestionably more “natural” than illicit performance enhancers.