Towards a sportive agoraphobia of professional athletes

Abstract

In careers that span anonymity to public individual, the work of professional athletes is highly visible: anyone can observe and comment on what they do. Based on the accounts of 26 full-time, UK-based professional athletes from seven sports, eight female and 18 male interviewees, the object of this article is to examine the working lives of professional athletes and how, as they go about daily routines, they value and manage the fluid balance between privacy and social participation. The focus is on an emerging uneasiness with ‘social’ spaces, proposing the idea of a sportive politics of agoraphobia, examining the ways in which professional athletes cope with the highly visible aspects of their daily lives, importantly their fears of uninvited attention from strangers, people who are well-acquainted with past work performances and who possess personal information. The data indicate that professional athletes go about their daily routines unhesitatingly careful of where and how they can be vulnerable to personal intrusion and transgressing norms of interaction. Their strategies to cope with their ‘being’ in public involve a combination of conveying normalness, performing positive affect, and adjusting to being interpreted in public.