Sport and Work

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Faster, higher, stronger, said Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the Modern Olympic Games. And since 1896, whenever each Olympiad has convened, that motto has been realized. Indeed, the quest for greater achievement has become the goal of every sport.In Sport and Work, Bero Rigauer argues that the pressure exerted upon athletes for faster, higher, stronger performances has dehumanized the athlete, transforming him into the tool of a tightly ordered social system while corrupting the purpose of sport. Sport, Rigauer declares, is merely disguised work. And like the working world, it has become specialized, bureacratized, inhumane, and repressive.Published in West Germany in 1969, Sport and Work was recognized immediately as a fundamental and original critique of the role of sports in modern society. Now Allen Guttmann's translation and introduction demonstrate that there is no other work in English that is as extensive or that even approaches Rigauer's point of view.Basing his critique on a neo-Marxist perspective, Rigauer rejects the blind sports fanaticism of Marxist scholarship. He dissects all sports structures, be they East German, Soviet, or American. His argument rests on several premises: that achievement in sport has become a model for achievement in the workplace, that the two worlds share the same language, that training schedules, as they are tiresome, tedious, and mechanical, no longer resemble the contest but rather the nine-to-five monotony of the work day. Any player who would change the methodology of training -- like any worker attempting to cchange corporate protocol -- meets with insurmountable resistance.In Rigauer's estimation, the athlete has become a commodity. "One speaks of a 9.9-second man, a million-dollar ballplayer, a 53-second freestyler, " Rigauer comments. "Behind these quantifications, the living human, with his special qualities, disappears."Rigauer concludes that modern sport should be replaced by spontaneous play and non-competitive games. "Sports, " he writes, "must free themselves financially and ideologically from state control." They must attempt to satisfy not the system but the individual.A classic work of sociology in the great tradition of German thought, Sport and Work propounds a forceful, lucid thesis that has already become a major stimulus to further thinking about the role of sports in the modern world.