Challenging interpretive privilege in elite and professional sport: one [athlete’s] story, revised, reshaped and reclaimed

Abstract

This performance autoethnography explores some of the tensions, contradictions and consequences of stories in elite sport. Using my embodied experience, the performance questions how the socially constructed physical ‘I’ is created by those with interpretive privilege. Sports news media, collected over a 14-year period – stories about me – provide one strand of a dialogical narrative in which the focus is sporting excellence. Contrasting these stories, I draw on diary extracts, stories, poems and songs, written by me, to weave a second reflexive understanding of my self, identity and life-playing professional sport. The justification for turning to arts-informed research practice was to explore and include creative, embodied, subjective and emotional aspects of life, identities and selves which can be too easily obscured or omitted through traditional methodological approaches. This approach makes possible a more holistic portrayal of identity development, selfhood and relationships, and therefore provides some unusual, if not unique, insights regarding how athletes’ lives can be interpreted, shaped, edited, revised and reclaimed. I hope the performance, and its textual representation here, contributes to the expanding use of arts-informed research by showing the relevance to practitioners in elite and professional sport.