Los catecúmenos de la aceleración: deporte de alto rendimiento y vértigo social

Abstract

Behind the allegedly intuitive relationship between sport and society, different ways of analyzing the normativity shared by both spheres coexist. Regarding high-performance sports, as a natural extension of modern sport, there are non conclusive developments comprising one of the most suggestive and explanatory late-modern diagnoses: that of social acceleration. Consequently, the article investigates the connection between the contemporary way of life and the principles, rules and values that dominate the generality of high-performance sports today, by means of theory and social philosophy tools, and to a lesser extent, of contemporary philosophy-of-sport’s categories. It is argued that this connection constitutes a plausible line of analysis to overcome the usual discussions and diatribes between externalism and internalism, since it allows to highlight cultural determinations that, being morally undesirable and unwantedly promoted by those who dedicate their time to the phenomenon of sport (as spectators or consumers), manage to explain the functionality that high-performance sports fulfills in the reproduction of a certain general socio-ontological framework within contemporary societies.