Sport in a Populist Age

Abstract

Abstract Sport, like all popular cultural forms, is a contested terrain. However, and largely due to its peculiar emotive resonance, sport is perhaps more susceptible to appropriation by political entities, of whatever inflection. During the last twenty years, and in various national settings, populist forms of leadership and governance have come to the fore, most notably among parties and people on the right of the political spectrum. Sport has thus become a vehicle through which such right-leaning populist rhetorics, discourses, and performances have served explicit political ends. Our current populist age, synonymous with—but not singularly reducible to—the inflammatory Trump presidency, is marked by distinctive articulations of political populism within, and through, the realm of sport. This special issue explores the socio-historic forces responsible for the contemporaneous generative relations linking sport, physical culture, and populist politics. This introductory essay offers a conceptual grounding of populism, explicates the important distinction between left and right iterations of populism, and provides a brief overview of the articles in this issue. The articles explore issues of ethnonationalism, race and racism, homonationalism, Trump and football, fascism and sport, and regional iterations of sport and populism (e.g., Europe and Latin America). As a collection, the special issue provides a touchstone for the contemporary and historical study of sport and populism.