Bruce Kidd

A new social movement: Sport for development and peace

In recent years, national and international sports organizations, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), universities and schools have conducted programmes in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and the disadvantaged communities of the First World to assist sports development (e.g. Olympic Solidarity), humanitarian relief (e.g. Right to Play), post-war reconciliation (e.g. Playing for Peace), and broad social development (e.g. Kicking AIDS Out). These initiatives, linked under the banner of ‘Sport for Development and Peace’ (SDP), have been prompted by athlete activism and an idealist response to the fall of apartheid, and enabled by the openings created by the end of the Cold War, the neo-liberal emphasis upon entrepreneurship and the mass mobilizations to ‘Make Poverty History’. A major focus of policy development has been the United Nations, the SDP International Working Group, and the Commonwealth Advisory Body on Sport. This essay sketches out the landscape of this new movement, critiques the problems and considers the prospects.

The Culture Wars of the Montreal Olympics

The Montreal Olympics are often remembered for their extravagant mismanagement and unfulfilled expectations, usually attributed to the citys flamboyant Mayor Drapeau. But this paper argues that the difficulties of the Montreal organizers must be understood in the context of a bitter clash of nationalisms and a deep-rooted debate about the purposes of sport, both of which served to divide the governments responsible for funding Canadian sport and undermine public confidence in the Games. The events themselves were quite successful, and the social investment in staging them contributed significantly to the long- term development of sports and fitness in many parts of Canada, but those accomplishments continue to be clouded by the contending nationalisms. While the Montreal Games created a brief moment of festive intercultural celebration, they did not unblock the dominant cultural rigidities of the host community.

Cautions, Questions and Opportunities in Sport for Development and Peace

Sport for development and peace (SDP) has become a recognised strategy of social intervention in disadvantaged communities throughout the world, with an array of proclamations, endorsements, programmes, organisations, specialists, students and researchers. The ambition is to recruit sport (and other forms of physical activity) to the realisation of the international community’s development goals, such as the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially gender equality, child and maternal health, the anti-stigmatisation and prevention of HIV/AIDS, and the creation of global partnerships, and the Commonwealth’s goals of democracy and development. The UN and the Commonwealth encourage member states to undertake SDP and have their own offices and regularly scheduled meetings to promote and co-ordinate it, while national governments contribute to it as a form of developmental assistance. The UK government has an entire office devoted to international development, for example and, as part of its hosting of the 2012 Olympics in London, has promised to engage an additional 12 million children in 20 countries in educational sport. It is not only the firstworld countries. Ghana is an ardent advocate throughout the African Union, and Cuba has provided free training in sport and physical activity for community development for teachers from 82 countries. The established sports organisations, such as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the major International Federations (IFs), and national multi-sport bodies such as the Norwegian Olympic Committee and Confederation of Sports (NIF) and Commonwealth Games Canada (CGC) also conduct programmes, as do hundreds of NGOs, big and small, from every corner of the globe. The most visible NGOs, such as the Kenya-based Mathare Youth Sport

Sports and masculinity

Feminist scholarship has had a profound impact upon the study of sports. It has forced us to recognize the gendered nature of these activities and to question the traditional exclusion and marginalization of most females from sports. It has reinforced and extended the social history insight that modern sport is not the essential, universal historical practice that it was once thought to be, but a family of related activities developed under the specific conditions of rapidly industrializing Europe and spread by immigration, emulation and imperialism. We now understand sports as originating as ‘male practices’, developed by males for males, without the needs and experiences of females taken into account in any way, so that every generation of girls and women has had to fight to write themselves into this history. Often overlooked in the feminist struggle for opportunities and the politics of gender equity has been the effect of sports upon men. Yet sports have a profound effect upon men, our sense of ‘masculinity’, our relationships with other men (as well as with women) and our place in societies, whether we are players, spectators or entirely ignorant of sports. It took me a long time to recognize this and the special privilege that sports conferred upon me, far longer than it took to acknowledge the justice in feminist campaigns for fair and equitable opportunities and resources. This article was my very first attempt to come to terms with these issues. It was written for a collection on masculinities, edited by Michael Kaufman, a pioneering scholar and activist on issues of men, gender and power. In 1990, I joined with Kaufman and other men to form the White Ribbon Society to educate men about our responsibility to help end the violence against women.

Taking the rhetoric seriously: proposals for Olympic education.

Despite the familiar claim that participation in the Olympic sports is broadly educational and developmental, a growing body of empirical evaluation suggests otherwise—so much so, that at the very least, beneficial results can no longer be left to chance. However important, most of what is called Olympic education addresses other concerns. This paper, written by an active participant in the Olympic Movement, argues for a formal, outcomes-based pedagogy of the Olympic sports and the Olympic Games, and offers several proposals on how it may be realized.

Muscular Christianity and value-centred sport: The Legacy of Tom Brown in Canada

Tom Browns Schooldays was always well known in Canada, almost from the first edition. The ideas about sport as education for citizenship and social responsibility it dramatized, often referred to as ‘muscular Christianity’, were widely diffused within Canadian society. This paper argues that muscular Christian values influenced a broad spectrum of Canadian movements for progressive social change, and contributed to the development of many important institutions of youth recreation and socialization, including amateur sport. Whereas muscular Christianity is often associated with right-wing political ideas and fundamentalist Christian churches today, in Canada it was linked through the social gospel to the left. The influence of muscular Christianity is still exerted in Canadian amateur sport, particularly through the turn to ‘values-centred sport’ that followed Ben Johnsons disqualification for steroids from the Seoul Olympics.

Medical and Ethical Concerns Regarding Women With Hyperandrogenism and Elite Sport

Note published in Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism on 01 March 2015, freely available at: https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2014-3206.

The Olympic Movement and the sports-media complex.

The history of sport is inseparable from the history of the mass media. The rules and the ways games are played, the values and narratives associated with sports, teams and rivalries, the audiences that follow or ignore particular sports and of course the revenues that certain athletes and enterprises enjoy have all been profoundly shaped by the mass media. In most countries in the world today, most people form their knowledge of sports from the mass media and not from direct experience. While mass media coverage of sports is usually presented as a series of neutral windows, and most of those who report on sport try their best to be as accurate as possible, the presentations of sports in the media are deeply structured – if not deliberately framed – by the institutions that produce and disseminate them, as the last several decades of scholarship have clearly shown. In the world of rights fees, very few broadcasts are independent of the interests they cover; on the contrary, they are contractually controlled by those very interests in the partnerships Sut Jhally called ‘the sport–media complex’. These partnerships now extend to the Olympic Games. In this paper, the keynote address to a conference in Calgary on the eve of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games, I reviewed this history and its implications for the Olympic Movement. I argued that the International Olympic Committee should use its control over the Games in the way that other sports enterprises do to ensure that Olympic broadcasters contributed to the humanitarian educational goals of the Olympic Movement and, at the very least, to ensure a multitude of broadcasting perspectives. At the time, I was chair of the Olympic Academy of Canada.

The global sporting legacy of the Olympic Movement

What has been the impact of the Olympic Movement on the long-term development of sport around the world? The obvious answer is that it has been transformative, but what about the details? To what extent does the International Olympic Committee (IOC) deliberately plan its activities and structure the Olympic and Winter Olympic Games to bring about long-term, sustainable opportunities for sport and physical activity? How could it do this more effectively? In recent years, the most frequently cited – and studied – Olympic legacies are in the areas of infrastructure (urban renewal, transportation, communications, housing, and sports facilities), international ‘branding’ and tourism, accessibility, and the enhanced capacity of community leaders. The benefits to sport and physical activity are simply taken for granted, on the assumption that new and refurbished sporting facilities and the inspiration of champions ensure increased participation in sport and physical activity. Yet recent research indicates that ‘inspiration is not enough’, that without planned, accessible, and sustained new programmes to build upon the interest generated by Olympic Games, increased participation may not occur. In Canada, for example, despite a long history of successful games and heroic athletic performances, child and youth participation rates in sport and physical activity continue to fall. Yet in the build-up to the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, none of the Canadian sports federations in the Olympic winter sports were engaged in legacy planning or programming, nor did anyone encourage them to do so. I wrestled with these questions in this paper, written in 2002 for a conference jointly sponsored by the Olympic Study Centre at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the IOC. I concluded that the IOC must do much more to institutionalize and strengthen its contribution to sport and physical activity.

The philosophy of excellence: Olympic performances, class power and the Canadian state†

In the build-up to the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Vancouver, Canadians debated the appropriateness of Own the Podium (OTP), a programme created by the Canadian Olympic Committee, the Canadian Paralympic Committee, the Vancouver Organizing Committee and the federal and provincial governments to prepare Canadian athletes for the Games, with special grants for intensified training, ‘top secret’ research and privileged access to Games facilities. Critics asked, is it consistent with the intercultural spirit of the Olympic Movement for the host country to put so much emphasis on its own athletes winning? The doubts were quickly forgotten when the Games opened and Canadian athletes performed better than ever before, winning a record 14 gold medals and 26 medals overall, and 72 top eight finishes, the most of any nation. Although it was often portrayed as completely brand new, OTP built upon two previous efforts to give Canadian athletes a boost for home-country games – Game Plan, established for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, and Best Ever, for the 1988 Olympic Winter Games in Calgary. The architect and driving force of OTP, former Olympic gold medallist and veteran sports leader Roger Jackson, had been deeply involved in both Game Plan and Best Ever. Those earlier programmes, too, had spurred debates about the purposes and priorities of Olympic sport, and the relationship of the Canadian Olympic Movement to the state. This article was written prior to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. In it, I analysed the political, economic and ideological context for the development of athlete assistance programmes in Canada, arguing that they should be continued but augmented to give athletes greater economic and educational benefits, and restructured to give them more control over the direction of their lives. I also argued that the state should do much more to fund broadly based opportunities for sport and physical activity. At that time, I was the volunteer chair of the Olympic Academy of Canada, an annual workshop designed to address the most difficult issues facing the Olympic Movement in Canada. I had been appointed to that position by Roger Jackson, the then president of the Canadian Olympic Association.