This article examines the history of Canada Olympic Park (COP) as it transitioned from the Paskapoo Slopes to a venue for the Calgary 1988 Winter Olympic Games and how the site framed the fight for gender equality in the sport by women ski jumpers in Canada. Ski jumping is a sport that can be considered a “nature sport” as it is practiced in the open air while simultaneously relying on built environments. Understanding the COP ski jumping venue as a “sportscape” and a gendered landscape provides a unique opportunity to explore the tensions between land, air, and the body in this nature sport. Historical analysis of the XV Winter Olympic Games inventories held at the City of Calgary Archives is combined with autoethnographic reflections of my past experiences as a ski jumping athlete who trained at the COP ski jumping venue and plaintiff in the court case to get a women’s ski jumping event added to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games to frame my analysis. This paper argues that women ski jumpers at COP carved out spaces of resistance for themselves, shifted the gendered landscape of the ski jumps, and effected change across generations of women ski jumpers on and off the hill.
Browse
Carving Out Spaces of Resistance: Remembering Women’s Ski Jumping, Gendered Spaces, and Built Environments at Canada Olympic Park, 1987–2019
Charlotte Mitchell
Contributors
The Early Years of Chicago Soccer, 1887–1939
Chris Bolsmann
Becoming a Leading Player in Protecting the Mountain Environment: The Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme and the Path to the 1982 Kathmandu Declaration
Philippe Vonnard
In La Moitié de la Gloire, Axel Mayenfisch’s documentary about the 1952 Swiss expedition to Chomolungma (Mount Everest), André Roch recalls how the retreating climbers simply abandoned much of their gear, either leaving it where it was or “throwing it into holes [crevasses].” Roch’s tale was by no means unusual, as mountaineers at that time gave little thought to what became of their waste. By the 1970s, however, climbers were becoming increasingly aware of their impact on the environment. The resulting change of attitude led many mountaineering organizations to take concrete steps to protect the mountains (e.g., cleanup campaigns) and to issue waste management guidelines for trips into the high mountains. The Union internationale des associations d’alpinisme 1982 Kathmandu Declaration—a charter of ten principles for achieving greater harmony with the mountain environment—was an important milestone in this process. Drawing on documents held in the extensive archives of the Union internationale des associations d’alpinisme, the current paper retraces the path that led to the Kathmandu Declaration and the process by which the environment became an important aspect of the aforementioned organization’s work. It also examines the hypothesis that the organization has progressively adopted a conservationist stance toward protecting nature; its aim is to reconcile environmental protection and economic development (especially tourism). The history of the Kathmandu Declaration supports this hypothesis, as it shows how the notion of sustainable development, which emerged in the 1980s, came to dominate conceptions of mountain protection.
Nature Games: Traditional Indigenous Games and Environmental Stewardship in Oceania
Tom Fabian, Gary Osmond, and Murray G. Phillips
Traditional games are often situated in counter distinction to modern sport forms and are not well understood in Western society or scholarship. However, from these games, we have the opportunity to learn much about local play and physical culture. This article focuses on traditional Indigenous games in Oceania and how they can be used as a lens for the development of environmental stewardship or ecological sensibilities. The aims of this study are twofold: (1) to lay a foundation for future research in this area and (2) to situate traditional games within the broader sport ecology conversation. By deconstructing the embodied nature of traditional games and overviewing the histories of environmentalism in Oceania, a more grounded claim can be made for the relevance of traditional games within sport and leisure studies scholarship, including sport history, sport sociology, sport anthropology, and sport ecology. The nature games of Oceania yield diverse insights into Indigenous epistemologies, ecological sensibilities, and how outdoor play can be understood as a form of climate action.
Volume 54 (2023): Issue 2 (Nov 2023)
Twice Invisible, Twice Clandestine. Football and Lesbianism in Spain During the Years of Democratic Transition (1970–1982)
Dolors Ribalta Alcalde and Xavier Pujadas
The main objective of this paper is to analyze the relationship between women’s football and lesbianism during the 1970s in Spain as well as the invisibility characteristics of this group of women in the context of the invisibility of women’s football in this period and in the context of the political transition until 1982. In the repressive context of late Francoism and given the validity until 1978 of laws that expressly persecuted homosexuality, social, cultural, legal, and political pressure had a very important impact on lesbian women who participated in the incipient practice of football in Spain in the 1970s. Some of these players built gay social networks through sports clubs and later started clandestine meetings in bars and private celebrations. The period studied—between 1970 and 1982—coincided with the rebirth of women’s football in Spain and the international emergence of this sport. The research has been based on the use of in-depth interview as a method and historiographical technique that has allowed us to obtain the life stories of nine lesbian or heterosexual women football players in different Spanish cities (who in general have lived and live in a private sexual identity) and two coaches linked to women’s teams. These sources have been expanded and contrasted from others of a documentary nature (specialized press and bibliography) to reconstruct the context studied and contrast the reliability of the information collected. In conclusion, it has been established that, despite the low visibility of women’s football and homosexuality, the legal pressure of the period and the opposition of the public authorities and institutions of the dictatorship, the field of football allowed these women to overcome some of the difficulties in the process of building their identity and discrimination based on sexual orientation. In turn, support networks—especially of teammates—private parties and atmosphere bars, were fundamental to the life experience of young lesbian athletes in the still repressive context of the end of the Franco dictatorship and the first years of the young democratic regime in Spain.
L’itinéraire biographique d’un promoteur de l’alpinisme performatif. L’engagement de Lionel Terray dans l’avènement d’un nouveau modèle en France (1921–1965)
Arthur Malé and Michael Attali
À partir des années cinquante, l’alpinisme connaît une évolution éthique et idéologique. Icône de cette période, Lionel Terray promeut un modèle performatif dont les soubassements se situent dans son parcours. Alors que les Premières constituaient un objectif majeur, désormais, le record devient légitime. Cette nouvelle conception va contribuer à ériger le style alpin en modèle de référence. Mobilisant des données issues des revues fédérales de l’univers montagnard, de la presse généraliste et des comptes-rendus d’expédition, cette étude saisit les fondements de l’évolution de l’alpinisme au regard du positionnement de Lionel Terray. Il amorce sa sportivisation par l’intermédiaire de la rationalisation de sa pratique comme de l’évolution des objectifs. L'émergence de cette conception sportive et performative repose sur des innovations matérielles et conceptuelles qui infléchissent les usages, et dont L. Terray a contribué à leur diffusion.
Contributors
Retouched and Remarkable: Female Athletes in La Culture Physique (1904) as Historical and Visual Documentation
Rachel Ozerkevich
In 1904, Edmond Desbonnet launched La Culture Physique, a magazine that presented itself as scientific and entertaining in its promotion of strength athletes. La Culture Physique prioritized photomechanical imagery to demonstrate the visual merits of the conditioned human body. A surprising number of women feature in nearly each month’s issue. The magazine represented these athletes using a number of editing techniques that made their bodies seem remarkably muscular and yet conventionally feminine. But the specific formal qualities of the publication—such as paper quality, printing technology, and size—helped mask the work that went into making its subjects appear real. La Culture Physique is one of very few extant sources wherein the muscularity of specific women is promoted alongside men’s during a period when gender disparity was deeply engrained in French society. La Culture Physique worked within and at times pushed against dominant French cultural values articulated around concepts of gender and belonging, using a set of tools that packaged its contents and form as works of art: as legible, desirable, and collectable. This paper demonstrates that these same tools also helped the publication maintain its veneer of authority. La Culture Physique has yet to be examined from an art historical perspective. This paper seeks to remedy this by arguing that La Culture Physique’s 1904 issues are a crucial source of historical and visual documentation for scholars interested in how women participated and were represented in early French physical culture.