SF Sport and the Individual Talent

While related to the third chapter’s healthy acknowledgement of bodily limitations, this chapter outlines in more detail the predominance of systemic thinking in the context of sport and the allied forgetting of the experience of the individual athlete. Against this trend, the sf stories, films, and even video games in this chapter highlight the experiences of individual athletes, even in team sports, and the positive role that sport may play in their lives. In this way, it highlights the biological humanity of the athlete over and against the abstraction to which much social criticism condemns them. How, it asks, is sport important to the identity of the individuals who engage them?