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Wendy O’Brien, Caroline Riot, and Clare Minahan

In this paper, the authors explore how athletes from the Global South interact with the material environment of an international training camp program in the lead up to a major event. Set within the context of Pasifika nations with colonial and missionary legacies, they examine the material, affective, sensory, and rhythmic forces at work to produce enabling or constraining capacities for emplaced physical capital in athletes. Driven by a desire to improve their performance, athletes resisted, appropriated, and adopted various high-performance practices to develop their emplaced physical capital capacities.

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Adele Pavlidis, Simone Fullagar, and Wendy O’Brien

Focusing on the Australian Football League and its development of a national competition for women, this article contributes toward broader debates around the inclusion and incorporation of women in professional sport. It traces the particular logics and desires (such as corporate expansion) that drove the Australian Football League to develop a women’s competition in the name of equality. We map the organizational tensions and affects that produce (the doing of) gender equality through different desires. Drawing on feminist new materialist conceptions of assemblage, we work to identify the material (numbers of women and girls participating, revenue, and expenses) and discursive (attitudes toward girls and women, meanings attached to sport, and gender) entanglements that contribute to the (de)valuing of women in male-dominated sporting organizations and how this might be disrupted both now and in the future.

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Wendy O’Brien, Tracy Taylor, Clare Hanlon, and Kristine Toohey

Professional team male-dominated sports have been built on masculine values; however, these values are challenged by the increasing number of women athletes entering this workplace. In this research, we explore the suitability and gender appropriateness of existing management processes and practices through three women’s professional and semiprofessional leagues. Drawing on a feminist perspective of continuum of care, players (n = 36) and organizational representatives (n = 28) were interviewed to gain insights into how athletes and organizations contend with their rapidly evolving workplaces. Framed around the values of affirmation, empowerment, and belonging, the continuum of care contrasts players’ everyday experiences of care with how organizations administer care. The research contributes through application of the feminist continuum of care. We present considerations for the management of female professional athletes in ways that are careful and an alternative value system that is affirmative, inclusive, and empowering.

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Claire E. Badenhorst, Katherine E. Black, and Wendy J. O’Brien

Hepcidin, a peptide hormone with an acknowledged evolutionary function in iron homeostasis, was discovered at the turn of the 21st century. Since then, the implications of increased hepcidin activity have been investigated as a potential advocate for the increased risk of iron deficiency in various health settings. Such implications are particularly relevant in the sporting community where peaks in hepcidin postexercise (∼3–6 hr) are suggested to reduce iron absorption and recycling, and contribute to the development of exercise-induced iron deficiency in athletes. Over the last decade, hepcidin research in sport has focused on acute and chronic hepcidin activity following single and repeated training blocks. This research has led to investigations examining possible methods to attenuate postexercise hepcidin expression through dietary interventions. The majority of macronutrient dietary interventions have focused on manipulating the carbohydrate content of the diet in an attempt to determine the health of athletes adopting the low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diets, a practice that is a growing trend among endurance athletes. During the process of these macronutrient dietary intervention studies, an observable coincidence of increased cumulative hepcidin activity to low energy availability has emerged. Therefore, this review aims to summarize the existing literature on nutritional interventions on hepcidin activity, thus, highlighting the link of hepcidin to energy availability, while also making a case for the use of hepcidin as an individualized biomarker for low energy availability in males and females.