Barbaric Sport A Global Plague

Marc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing essay against the global phenomenon of sport, which he describes as both arecent form of savagery and the opium of the people. The charges leveled against sport are damning and numerous: sport is an instrument for racism and the bolstering of repression, with global events such as the Olympics used to legitimize major political crackdowns; doping must be understood as an imperative rather than an aberration of sport. Most ominously, with its location at the very center of the society of the spectacle, globalization, and the liberal-capitalist system, the phenomenon of sport has become a new world power and an immense destructive force, a steamroller of decadent modernity.

Marc Perelman is an architect and Professor of Aesthetics at the Université Paris Ouest-Nanterre Le Défense. He is the author of numerous books, including L’Ère des stades: Genèse et structure d’unespace historique, Urbs ex machina, Le Corbusier and (with Jean-Marie Brohm) Le Football, une peste émotionnelle.