Messages from the future: Significance of sport and exercise in the third millennium

Abstract

Some predictions are made on the future developments of exercise and sport in the third millennium by examining certain trends and signals of the last centuries of the second millennium. Six standpoints are put forward: (a) The human body is designed for movement; we are ‘homobiles.’ Virtual reality cannot replace corporeality. (b) Sport was a product of modernity. The postmodern era will have to replace the worn out sporting value of progress at all costs. (c) Professional elite sport will survive as a new form of neo-gladiatorism, an independent branch of show biz. (d) The monopoly of the western sports model will be replaced by a postmodern mélange of new movement (sub)cultures. This new movement culture will be characterised by hybridization. (e) Physical education will end its dangerous liaison with sport pedagogy and will go back to its roots. Its core business will be movement enculturation, both in theory and practice. (f) As sport will no longer be the appropriate denomination of the new movement culture, some of the paradigmatic myths linked with sport will have to be critically revised. A better concept and term must be found than sport science for the biocultural science of human movement and humans in movement.