Ninth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

How do sport governing agencies negotiate the practices of rule creation, failure, and altering in the face of emerging technological developments and the issues that they cause? This negotiation is of particular interest in an era of competition where athlete’s bodies have slowed their exponential athletic growth. Instead, technological and scientific developments can now make the difference between winning and losing by only a sliver of a percentage. The possibility of undermining the supposed meritocracy of sport via technoscientific means brings forth questions of fair and moral play in elite competition. The responding policies of governance by sports regulators offer insight into other competitive areas of society and their governance, from finance to academics. Overall, this project seeks to build upon existing STS research on emerging technologies and the governance of bodies within an elite sport framework. To investigate this negotiation between sport and emerging technoscience, this project will examine two cases in two different sports. The first, the case of Caster Semenya, examines how the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federation) approached and changed their policy on gender over the past half century – a case that effectively redefines the athletic body based on the technoscience of gene testing. The second, the case of the Speedo LZR swimsuit, will cover how technoscientific developments in the engineering of swimsuits manipulated the human body to a point where the international swimming regulatory agency, FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation), determined results to no longer be a result of human endeavor but rather artificially inflated by technoscience.