Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the cultural politics of the International Olympic Committee's co-option of lifestyle sports into the Olympic Games, and to consider the inevitable ‘conflicts’ that lifestyle sports face in relation to the Olympic Games. The inevitable conflict is that when lifestyle sports are included in the Olympic Games, they are required to “identify” with the modern sporting ideology of “achievement sports” as described by Henning Eichberg. In the following, the process of discussion of this paper is briefly presented.
In Chapter 1, the meaning of the birth and development of lifestyle sports is reaffirmed as a unique
sporting culture of ‘resistance’ and ‘alternatives’ to the modern sporting ideology of ‘achievement sport’.
In chapter 2, the process of inclusion of lifestyle sports into the Olympic Games by the IOC will focus on the differences in cultural politics before and after the Olympic Agenda 2020, which was adopted by the IOC General Assembly in December 2014.
In Chapter 3, “conflicts” that arise when lifestyle sports are included in the Olympic Games and when lifestyle sports are required to “identify” with the ideology of modern sports are examined. In considering this issue, it is worth noting Antoine Cantin-Brault's analysis of skateboarding, which draws on the concept of ‘Reification’ developed by Theodor Adorno in his Dialectic of the Negative (1966). Although Cantin-Brault stated that Skateboarding's likelihood of becoming an Olympic sport in 2020 will all but certainly be the final nail in the coffin of its reification [Cantin-Brault, 2015:65], the way in which his “prophecy” is interpreted will have a bearing on the nature of lifestyle sports after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
