Tales of Addiction in Sports Life Writing

My thesis addresses the lack of critical engagement with sports life writing in the literary field. It fills this gap by analysing the genre’s unique and understudied presentation of addiction, both to various substances and sporting praxis itself. Working through the literature of three sporting contexts – professional football, professional cycling and ultra-distance running – I show how the life of the athlete and their writing are embedded in addiction and recovery. They embody and describe compulsive, addictive attitudes to training, cultures of performance enhancement, recreational substance abuse, alcoholism, substitutive addictions and the failed or successful rehabilitation from these factors. Thus, this thesis establishes a large sub-section of sports life writing as an integral source of literature on and about addiction. Then, specifically, it shows how the genre’s presentation of addiction is mediated through the confessional and (non-)confessional modes, a structure which provides a contemporary literary catharsis upon which the sporting recovery narrative is built. Moreover, the thesis emphasises that this recovery narrative presents sport, and the continued, addictive and excessive engagement with it, as a potential rehabilitating solution to addiction issues. Like the very sporting careers described across sports life writing, the thesis frames this active recovery as a form of what I term renewal-in-depletion: an intensely consumptive mode of athletic praxis that mimics unsustainable neoliberal patterns of resource extraction. Lastly, throughout its three chapters, the thesis successfully explicates the strong bind and interrelation between the addictive narratives of professional sportspeople and the neoliberal contexts from which they arise.