In search of the desperate athlete: serious organised team sport athletes as neo-indentured labour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I pursue the ‘desperate athlete’—a familiar figure for me, a basketball coach and trainer—by arguing serious organised team sport athletes are neo-indentured labourers by illustrating the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport. This article contributes the original analogy ‘indentured’ to the philosophy of sport which is a stronger claim than what other scholars have argued, and in turn provides the neo-indentured desperate athlete as a framework and mode of understanding and to make sense of how serious organised team sport athletes are constructed, explained by way of Foucauldian concepts of objectification, discursive power relations and bio-power. It is an effort to introduce the original concept of the neo-indentured ‘desperate athlete’ and develop that figure as an important subject deserving of scholarly inquiry into the philosophy of discipline in team sport. To ignore the continuities of indentureship in contemporary serious organised team sport would be an example of sport discourse dismissing the inconvenient; so too would be ignoring the ‘desperate athlete’.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".