There’s a popular story that goes something like this: investing time, money, and resources into performance-sport will in turn contribute to improving public health. It’s a nice tale, and variations of it have been told over and over in the past few decades. The ideas at the core of it are so embedded in politics, policy, media, everyday conversations, and even some scholarship, that few question it. After all, watching world-class athletes perform clearly inspires people to be active, doesn’t it? And sport is healthy, isn’t it? Common stories would make us believe the answer to these questions is “yes”. But the truth, as our recent paper shows, is far less rosy and far more complicated.

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Historically, mainstream media have portrayed athletes differently based on intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Black athletes’ athleticism tends to be elevated, while white athletes are praised for intellectual attributes. Female athletes’ athletic contributions have been minimized, as they are often displayed in passive poses and sexualized, especially when they identify as heterosexual and appear stereotypically feminine.

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In February 2024, the New York Times published a two-part series on the results of a survey of men who are fans of women’s soccer. The survey addressed how and why men became fans of women’s soccer, the relationship between their fandom of men and women’s sport, and how they perceived and participated in fan communities. The survey was motivated by the sense that men’s fandom had been overlooked and underestimated, in part due to the predominant narrative of female professional athletes as empowering for girls and women.

Are there more men who profess fandom of women’s sport now than in the past? The truth is hard, if not impossible, to ascertain, as women’s sport leagues don’t regularly publish data on the composition of their audiences. However, there are hints from polls and academic studies that men’s interest in or consumption of women’s sport may be growing and is sometimes higher than that of women.

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Sport has long been intertwined with the study of human movement in North American post-secondary education. Whereas traditionally, the study of human movement and sport was housed within physical education programs, it is now predominantly offered through kinesiology programs that, more than ever before, align with narrowly defined health sciences. Much like how the Olympics celebrate “faster, higher, stronger” sporting bodies and performances, the current focus of kinesiology as a field of study is increasingly linked to an Olympic-like emphasis on educating students on how to produce “faster, higher, stronger” bodies, optimize performance, and individualizing narratives of health promotion. This intense fixation on functional movement and on narrow conceptualizations of health stands in contrast to kinesiology’s origins as “…the best option in promoting a broad-based disciplinary, professional, and performance approach to the study of physical activity” (Newell, 1990, p. 273). As scholars who study sport from a sociological perspective, we are concerned with these approaches to the study of human movement, as they minimize larger social forces and/or societal structures that impact experience of, access to, and opportunity for physical activity and sport.

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Elite sport, especially on display at large-scale televised events, can provide a site for social and political messaging, including in the form of support, dissent, or opposition. One of the most iconic examples of dissent occurred at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics when successful US athletes John Carlos and Tommie Smith, supported by Australian silver medal winner Peter Norman, took a symbolic stand against the deep and pervasive oppression of African Americans.  In more recent times, and in the wake of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, around Europe some sports stadiums witnessed fans flying Ukrainian flags: representing condemnation of Russia and support for Ukraine.

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In 2024, the Rubik’s Cube, the puzzle invented by the Hungarian professor of architecture Ernő Rubik, celebrates its 50th anniversary. We would like to take this opportunity to discuss how important Rubik’s invention has been to humanity. It is estimated that approximately one in seven people in the world have at least attempted to solve the Rubik`s Cube. This amounts to over a billion people. Rubik himself writes in his biography, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All, that the cube can bring out important qualities in each of us that are central to utilizing our creative potential, such as sharpening concentration, arousing curiosity, and activating the eagerness to discover solutions. The Rubik’s Cube has received attention in many different fields since its invention, including art, science, pedagogy, technology, politics, and philosophy. Not only that, the Rubik’s Cube has led to the creation of a new sport: speedcubing.

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Traditional Indigenous canoes alongside dragon boats at the 2013 All Nations Canoe Gathering, on the unceded Sen̓áḵw waterways (False Creek, Vancouver, BC) (“Canoe-0104” photo by Rey Torres, granted special permission for non-commercial use)

The #LANDBACK campaign across Turtle Island is a movement organized to get Indigenous Lands back into Indigenous hands and governance. It is an active, sociopolitical, “Indigenous-led movement” that resists settler colonialism. In some ways, #LANDBACK also resists political and legal tools, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, used to justify claims of land “discovered” along water routes. While the former doctrine claims that a “discoverer” could take possession of land if it was deemed as “discovered,” British colonialists used terra nullius (land belonging to no one) to justify claiming, renaming, and settling, as they understood their relationship to “vacant land” as ownership.

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Skateboarding has boomed globally over the last decade, and researchers have been quick to examine how intersecting social markers like race, gender, and age can influence people’s participation in this action sport. Yet, little research has considered disabled people’s participation in skateboarding and adaptive action sports, such as wheelchair motocross (WCMX), despite increased uptake among disabled people. Considering this gap, I explored the emerging adaptive action sports of skateboarding and WCMX.

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“…you begin to see how it’s all connected and the importance that we give these opportunities for Indigenous youth and Indigenous girls to be our future” ~Ryan Francis

On lands claimed by Canada, the ongoing project of settler colonialism targets Indigenous lives, languages, ways of knowing, connections to territory, and more. Settler colonialism is the claiming of lands already occupied by Indigenous peoples for the purposes of building wealth. It involves destroying Indigenous institutions and ways of knowing, while building what Daniel Heath Justice calls a “new social order” that is geared toward eliminating Indigenous peoples as Indigenous peoples. The violences of settler colonialism in the Canadian context include, for example, the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and how anti-Indigenous racism is embedded in institutions such as child welfare, the justice system, and higher education. As Tuck and Yang highlight, the violence of settler colonial invasion “is not temporally contained in the arrival of the settler but is reasserted each day of occupation.”

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Most brands, especially those that generate more than $100 million in annual revenue, don’t begin with a story about vomit. Yet, according to CrossFit, Inc. founder and former CEO Greg Glassman, the “eureka moment” of his now astronomically popular fitness program began just like that—with a teenage Glassman, having subjected himself to a grueling combination of barbell push presses and pull-ups, barfing on his garage floor. At the center of CrossFit’s origin story and its subsequent success is the human body at its most beautiful, its most playful, and its most grotesque. Indeed, in a previous article in Engaging Sports, Matt Crockett and Ted Butryn compellingly argue how CrossFit expresses a collective anxiety surrounding how our bodies atrophy in increasingly sedentary workplaces.

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