This book is about the making of high-performance athletes in modern sport and the ways in which diversity within and among athletes disrupts the potential for modern power to consume athletes’ lives. Before I can address the disrupting effects of hybrid athletes on the relentless efficiency of sport discipline, it is important that I introduce what I mean by the phrase ‘the making of high-performance athletes.’ In the next chapter I detail the technologies that go into the production or ‘making’ of high-performance athletes and show that, through subjection to elaborate and minutely detailed organization of their movements, powerful athletes...

For participants in high-performance sport, discipline refers to an ability to stay on task and to execute skills correctly without being distracted. Success in high-performance sport requires arid produces athletes who can persevere, who do not give in to competing desires, and who are strong-willed. To succumb to the pressures of a contest and revert to old habits of performance is a mark of an undisciplined team or individual and to resort to actions of retaliation or aggression leading to penalization, especially late in the game, reflects a disgraceful lack of discipline. Coaches and athletes understand that this discipline or...

Discipline takes hold of bodies by filling in gaps in time, space, and modality of movement. Organization of time, space, and movement constitute the technologies or constraints of docility that coaches utilize to close gaps between unskilled performance and the competitive standards for their sport. Technologies of discipline may also extend beyond the production of skill to other aspects of an athlete’s life, placing restrictions on what athletes eat, when they sleep, other activities in which they are engaged, and with whom they associate. Yet, even with the encroachment of sport discipline into time, space, and movement outside practice and...

Conflicts between people are produced whenever constraints conflict with the interests of those who are constrained. Because athletes and coaches bring different backgrounds and interests to high-performance sport, there is no uniform response to ethical conflicts or issues produced by the constraints of sport discipline. Hybrid participants bring hybrid responses to ethical issues and to interactions with team-mates and opponents. Even so, it would be unusual to find an adult athlete engaged in high-performance sport who fundamentally disagreed with the values of sport discipline. A high-performance athlete not only embodies the skills of a particular sport, he or she embodies...

It has been a purpose of this book to document how high-performance athletes and a set of ethical issues are produced by modern sport discipline. As important, however, I have wanted to show that athlete identity, and hence the ways in which athletes may contend with the demands of sport discipline, including the ethical issues it produces, are necessarily confounded by diversity and hybridity.

My purpose in this final chapter is to show that another way of thinking about ethics in sport is produced when discipline is confronted by diversity. I believe that the juxtaposition of diverse, hybrid participants with...