Abstract
Injury is a conspicuous feature of the practice and public spectacle of contemporary elite sports. The paper argues that the ‘biomedicalisation’ thesis (medico-industrial nexus, techno-scientific drivers, medical optimisation, biologisation, the rise of evidence and health surveillance) goes some way to capturing the use in elite sports injury of some highly specialised mainstream therapies and some highly maverick biological therapies, which are described. Nevertheless, these main strands of biomedicalisation do not capture the full range of these phenomena in the contexts of sports medicine and athletes' practices in accessing innovative, controversial therapies. Drawing on multi-method qualitative research on top-level professional football and cycling in the UK, 2014–2016, we argue that concepts of ‘magic’ and faith-based healing, mediated by notions of networking behaviour and referral systems, furnish a fuller explanation. We touch on the concept of ‘medical pluralism’, concluding that this should be revised in order to take account of belief-based access to innovative bio-therapies amongst elite sportspeople and organisations.
Highlights
Elite sport has become one of the defining spectacles of the modern era
In the above we have provided a range of evidence about referral practices, trust-building, medical specialisation, collective commitments to therapeutic practices and decisionmaking in the context of high pressures of elite sports injury
It is apparent from the foregoing that the biomedicalisation thesis, even as it allows for corporatisation, contested evidence about biotherapeutic technologies' effectiveness and sports' quest for physical enhancement and the associated biologisation of identity, cannot account for the whole complexity of elite sports' therapeutic behaviours that we have illustrated
Summary
Elite sport has become one of the defining spectacles of the modern era. Promulgated via mass media its reach is global, and clubs and teams are packaged through highly visible corporate branding. The very top players can command salaries of tens of thousands of pounds per week, and though the scale is lower in professional cycling the very top riders winning international events can earn annual salary of £1e3 millions (Hervey, 2015). These sport businesses are associated with a wide variety of professional organisations, agents, service and product providers, media companies, sponsors, event organisers and so on. Professional international-level cycling teams (of which there are about ten based in the UK, comprising 10e15 contracted riders each), like football clubs, typically have a range of commercial sponsors and operate as branded businesses. Given the degree of scientisation and commercialisation of medical products in the field, it is reasonable to conceptualise it, building on Manzenreiter's concept above, as a ‘Sports Biomedical Industrial Complex’
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