Young Dutch commercially sponsored kite surfers: free as a bird?

Abstract

While coaches and organizational structures play a pivotal role in the disciplining of young athletes in traditional mainstream organized sports, young kite surfers seem to be free to develop their own skills and create their own identity and subcultures. However, the feeling of freedom of young commercially sponsored kite surfers may be more complex than the popular discourses within action sport cultures suggest. I use a Foucauldian framework to explore how disciplinary power, embedded in time and space, produces athletic skill and identity in adolescent kite surfers and informs their practices of freedom. In this paper, I show how young kite surfers negotiate constraints of space and time that are shaped by relationships with their parents, their kite surfing peers and their commercial sponsors. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven commercially sponsored male kite surfers, between 11 and 17 years old. In so doing, I found that although the discourse of freedom associated with kite surfing acts on their experiences, these young athletes were also subjected to disciplinary power produced by temporal and spatial limitations and capabilities, their subculture, digital media and commercialization.