From the Partners in Pursuit of Excellence to Own the Podium: An Ideological Slip in Canadian Olympic Sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From 1960s to present day, discourse on Canadian sport has incorporated phrase or slogan, the pursuit of excellence. Can we presume that the pursuit of excellence unifies this discourse; does it bring different stakeholders of sport together for a shared experience with a shared meaning? Is there a Canadian connaissance (1) of Olympic sport that is linked to the pursuit of excellence? Is there a general sense among Canadians that Olympic Games and the pursuit of excellence are somehow linked? This paper considers historically specific nature of this phrase in field of Olympic sport in Canada. More importantly, it reveals how the pursuit of excellence has not been a stable concept in Canadian sport. This genealogy reveals ideological shifts and slips that tell us about Canadian society and culture during a pivotal period in country's history. In discourse of sport, the pursuit of excellence can be interpreted as an immutable human ideal. However, it can also be seen as a rhetorical cliche that ineptly evokes motherhood values of sport that may or may not truly reflect ideological foundation of this pastime. This paper focuses on tension between high human ideal and utterly mundane nature of phrase. This paper probes discourse of Canadian sport which is understood as those cumulative texts (both spoken and performed) that converge at specific historical moments and in specific geographical places. (2) It is convergence of these texts that generate a collective sense of truth (une connaissance) about human society and its cultural practices. (3) The analysis is limited to discourse of Olympic sport in Canada between 1960 and present. In this case, I am interested in those texts that converge to provide Canadians with confident sense that Olympic sport is distinct from other genres of sport (NHL, NBA, WWE, Aboriginal sport, road hockey, etc.). Analysis focuses on so-called texts generated by governments and sport organizations. (4) These texts tend to take form of policy statements, funding proposals, and ideological treatises. Subsequent analysis will incorporate contribution of journalists and athletes to discourse of sport. Care is taken throughout analysis to expose extent to which authors of these official texts are simply one specific group of stakeholders in Canadian sport. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section considers historical context that shaped discourse of sport in Canada. The second section traces evolution of the pursuit of excellence in official texts of Canadian sport. The third section offers a theoretical analysis of power relationships in Canadian Olympic sport reflected in this genealogy. From perspective of method, this paper is a genealogy of one unifying concept in discourse of sport (the pursuit of excellence). (5) By focusing on the pursuit of excellence, analysis conforms to Michel Foucault's genealogical method of history. This approach to history reflects a ... strategy of conducting an ascending analysis of power, 'starting, that is, from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power have been--and continue to be--invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms ... (6) From outset, the pursuit of excellence is regarded as a linguistic signifier with its own history within field of sport. These four words seem to articulate underlying value of sport. From a theoretical perspective, the pursuit of excellence may also be described as a unifying concept in discourse of sport; it conveys a gravitas and logic for sport production. (7) It is a concept that seems to unify myriad texts that constitute discourse of sport. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".