"It's not about luck": the production of Australian elite athletes

Abstract

This thesis examines the mechanisms of athletes’ training to explore the production of Australian elite athletes within a premier national sports training institution in Canberra, Australia. Drawing on the twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork I undertook while living on campus at the institution, this thesis analyses the everyday practices and the numerous training processes of athletes as well as the contributions of coaches and sports science and sports medicine experts involved in crafting athletes into distinctive, elite subjects. Situated in the sporting embodiment literature within the broader field of the anthropology and sociology of sport, this project advances the empirical research on elite athletes, on elite sports institutions and on the complex mechanisms of training elite athletes. I explore the linking mental, moral, emotional, temporal, physiological and subjectified mechanisms of training that inform athletes’ daily lives and lived embodiment. Much of the existing research has examined one single sport, and relatively homogenous demographics of sporting participants. In contrast this thesis looks at male and female athletes in senior and junior levels of elite sport across a range of sports. In doing this, it sheds light on the shared experiences of the multiple mechanisms of elite training to create elite athletes. Through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault and a phenomenological understanding of habitus I explore how the disciplinary techniques of training produced by multiple agents influence elite athletes’ embodiment and experiences of the cultural norms of elite sport. Through the investigation of the mental, moral, emotional, temporal, physiological and subjectified mechanisms of training, I observe how the production of elite athletes is particularly marked by temporally informed micro-regimes, Hochschild’s (1979 and 1983) ‘emotion work’ and Mauss’s (1973) ‘techniques of the body’. In examining the influence of an elite athlete work ethic discourse and the moral code of elite sport on athletes through interlinking mechanisms of training, I argue that the production of Australian elite athletes is not about luck. Instead, an elite athlete’s habitus is reconstituted through interlinking mechanisms of training that are produced by multiple agents, including coaches, sports science and sports medicine experts and athletes alike, which craft elite athletes as distinct subjects.