From Motions to Missions: Interrogating Sport Organization Annual Reports as Works of Sport Memory

Abstract

Triathlon governing body annual reports (ARs) range from detailed, idiosyncratic documents that record deliberations, disagreements and triumphs to glossy promotional booklets that bury challenges and deliberations and cast the previous twelve months in the best possible light. Research on sport governing bodies centres on structures and practice, high profile bodies such as FIFA or the IOC, widely publicised failures in governance, or their relationship to specific historical contexts. Only a few studies theorise their use of administrative records such as ARs. This paper adds to this small field of scholarship by revisioning annual reports as acts of sport memory. Using a slice method, it considers the rhetoric, ommissions and blurred aspects of Australian and British ARs from three distinct periods in triathlon’s evolution into an Olympic sport: the foundational years of the mid-1980s, the aspirational years of the early-to-mid 1990s, and the years following the first Olympic triathlon, held in Sydney, 2000. Read as periodic installations in triathlon memory, the ARs reveal diminishing transparency over time, and a common focus on the sport’s Olympic status rather than the interests of their athletic communities, with implications for both sport governance researchers and the national governing bodies of Olympic sports.