Sports Geography

The field of sports geography began in the s and s with the work of American geographer John Rooney (Rooney ). Rooney is.
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What these authors discuss goes well beyond sports as being simply a form of recreation or leisure activity or a type of frivolous endeavor that has no consequence or meaning. Rather, sports have become so engrained within the very fabric of society that they extend from the everyday banal experiences of fans to the global sporting mega-events that mesmerize and draw together billions of people around the world. As such, extensive research on sports has been undertaken within many fields of academia, including history, sociology, economics, and psychology.

Yet, despite the wealth of knowledge on the subject in general and the many geographic relationships that are inherent in sports, geographers have historically not recognized the study of sports as a serious academic topic within their field.

Editorial. Sports Geography : an overview

This absence is made most apparent by the nonexistence of any sports-specific geography journals with the exception of Sport Place: An International Journal of Sports Geography , which was in publication from to Consequently, contemporary articles about the geography of sports are dispersed across a wide range of academic sources.

This reality indicates the potential for a range of research topics that are, in most cases, understudied from a geographic perspective. In many of the sources cited in this article, the authors make similar claims that geography as a discipline still has much to contribute to sports-centered discourses. This article demonstrates the pervasiveness of sports in society by highlighting many of the diverse themes that sports geographers have or with which they are currently engaged.

Sport, Geography of

In this way, it also provides a framework for further critical engagements on the intersections of sports and geography. The field of sports geography began in the s and s with the work of American geographer John Rooney Rooney Bale is currently considered by many to be the most influential sports geographer, and his Sports Geography is the most cited book in the field.

A final general overview textbook includes an edited volume, DeChano and Shelley , which demonstrates how sports can be used to teach geographic issues. Studying these maps and atlases urged researchers to try to design the models of the territorial structure of sports as well as the changing immigration processes.

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By researches in the area of sport geographic crystallised three conceptual systems:. Although the British Bale was convinced that sport geographic should be studied, still he followed the cartographic traditions and did not try to deal with the relationship between cause and effect Bale, J.

His methods of geographic models were taken over and used to design new sport facilities as well as to choose the most appropriate venues for sport organizations Gaffney, c, In the eighties football fields and racing tracks were in the focus while hooliganism, crowdedness and landscape changes were also studied as accompanying disturbances Bale, J. It was Bale who raised the attention to the role of sports as a unifying mass culture. Due to the recognition of how important sport geography is professionals started to apply its methods and models in the research of the mechanisms of social and ethnic identities.

Naturally telecommunication, media have also contributed to the interdisciplinary attention and interest regarding the global-cultural complexity of sport. Increasing social demand has also supported the development and the acceptance of sport geography. There has been a growing claim and demand to learn more about our geographic environment so that greater athletic sport performances could be achieved. Hungarian sport geographical studies were introduced only when the preferred dogmas of economic geography started to disappear.

It also meant that the massively culturally affected social geography and social sciences also became the research tools of sport geography. It is also true that articles Eiben, O. Arguably, it is only Rooney and Bale who have built reputations such as they are through sport-geographical studies.


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However, this is not to say that the spatial-analytic approach has far from disappeared as we shall show. Indeed, geographers of all kinds, from humanistic to statistical and positivistic, are currently undertaking studies in sports. In the second half of this paper we will draw attention to some recent studies that are carrying on the geographical tradition of writing about sport. But in most of the cases the contributions of French geographers were examples of the existing descriptive way of working.

Augustin , published some articles that were totally different from the other French publications. He still uses the descriptive way of working but we notice already a more holistic approach to his topics. A contemporary French sport geographer is the already mentioned Ravenel.

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The relation between population size and economic performances and the level of what Dejonghe , nowadays refers to as the consumer-oriented professional team sports could have been a main topic in spatial research. In most of the cases economists took over the sport related research of the relation between level of the teams, attendances and the size of the local population, time distance to the stadium, economic threshold, urban hierarchy and socio-economic characteristics of the population in the catchment area of a professional sport team.


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In Dejonghe, Van Hoof and Kemmeren published a book on the location-allocation issue of professional football in The Netherlands. The strong relation in The Netherlands between social geography and spatial planning resulted in some spatial oriented articles on stadiums. The relocation and modernization of the football stadiums resulted — according to Van Dam — into a positive relationship between the population living in its vicinity and its recently built stadium, most of them located outside the agglomeration. Sport was defined in this case as an expression of nationalism, regionalism or localism and Bale and Dejonghe a, b read them as a reaction against the rising economic dimension of professional team sports.

The organisation of the Olympic Games of in Barcelona was an interesting case for urban planners, geographers, economists and other researchers. Van der Moortele investigated the relation between football migration and the World system of Wallerstein and added another dimension on the explanation of migration fluxes. These have been selected almost at random and simply serve to illustrate the eclectic nature of sport-geographic research at the present time. Consider two examples with the focus on cycling. He explores the idea that human movements in and through a place, define our involvement with it and help to constitute a place.

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He examines the way in which the joining of cyclists and their machines bicycles and the resulting rhythms and kinaesthetic sensations give meaning to particular places. Indeed, this is what most colonial observers called it, in spite of its only superficial similarity to the western form of sportised high-jumping. Numerous allusions to western sports were applied to an indigenous physical activity. For example, colonial travelers referred to the Rwandan jumpers being recruited to participate in the Olympics , that they had champions , that they would easily break the world record , and that they were natural athletes.

In other words, the colonial representations referred to a world that never existed. It was an imaginative geography.