Abstract
This chapter examines enduring authoritarian sports cultures and how sports workers reproduce as well as resist hierarchical sports cultures. The emergent sports governance institutions illustrate competing sports oligarchies within the state, the NOC (National Olympic Committee) and sports federations, sustaining authoritarian sports cultures based on relations of patronage, fostering forms of bonded labour. The overlap of the state, party politics, sports associations and the media, reinforces patriarchal Sinhala Buddhist ethnonationalist notions of “sportive nationalism”. The integration of the military with sports institutions reinforces authoritarian masculine sports cultures marginalising women’s sports. By relating life stories of two women and two men who were elite sports workers, this chapter describes how sports labour negotiates structures of class, gender, ethnicity and disability.
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Biyanwila, S.J. (2018). Authoritarian Sports Cultures and Sports Workers. In: Sports and The Global South. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68502-1_7
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