Medal and continence: an anthropological analysis of high-performance athletes related to military sporting programs

Abstract

The objective of this research is to produce an ethnography of high-performance athletes related to military sporting programs, called military athletes, which, although exogenous to career and military circles stricto sensu, live some military ethos experiences and mobilize, both in the training routine and in the competitions, some notions that are valued into the barrack, such as hierarchy and discipline. In addition, they appropriate bodily and moral regimes to which they submit themselves when incorporated into these sporting programs by their athletic and performance expertise. According to the hypothesis proposed, these aspects would operate on the register of the fabrication of a hybrid sport-military person. Historically, there is a proximity between body techniques and military training concomitant with development of physical sports. If, on the one hand, one can observe a given militarization of sports techniques that serve specific purposes within the Armed Forces, on the other hand it can be observed a sportivization of the Armed Forces through sporting programs of incentive to high-performance sports, since these institutions have assumed part of the athletes associated with the Brazilian Olympic Committee. In order to achieve the proposed objective, field research will be made among these athletes and their coaches at their training places, which are not necessarily allocated to military equipment, in order to check their daily routines in the sport-military experience. It is expected, in this way, to understand the relations that may constitute the career of a high-performance military athlete, the tensions that may emerge from this specific context, as well as the convergences and diffractions in relation to more conventional careers, so to speak, in order to verify what comparative aspects would observe these military sporting programs in relation to other models of training high-performance athletes in Brazil. (AU)