Race and the Politics of Knowledge in Sports Science

Abstract

Introduction Sports science in South Africa was initially a neglected backwater in academic studies, undertaken by an eccentric group of tenacious dissidents. 1 Previously the term "physical education" had been used, but in 1985 the discipline's name was changed to "human movement studies". 2 The sports science curriculum, to this day, concerns itself narrowly with the technologies of sport performance, giving little consideration to the role of ideology and politics in the field. Two exceptions are the recent book Sport, Physical Culture, and the Moving Body: Materialisms, Technologies, Ecologies, 3 edited by Joshua I. Newman, Holly Thorpe, and David Andrews, and Malcolm MacLean's article challenging the hegemonic practices of sports science, "(Re)Occupying a Cultural Commons: Reclaiming the Labour Process in Critical Sports Studies". 4 While there has been some attention paid to the politics of knowledge in physical education at school level, 5 this is not the case in the university discipline known as "sports science". As a consequence, most sports science students have not engaged critically with "racial science", which, as this chapter will show, remains a powerful legacy of colonial and apartheid sport into the present. The vexed article 6 emerged from the Department of Sport Science of Stellenbosch University that had only recently, in 2018, been reassigned from the Faculty of Education to the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. It is a study that makes the coloured body central to the discipline's fixation on measurement; so, for example, the study cites theories that ascribe "the accelerated and unfavourable