Experiences of high-level women athletes in the face of the androcentric reality of sport

Abstract

The androcentric reality has ignored throughout history and currently ignores women athletes in general and the elite athletes in particular. This practice, that makes women athletes invisible in the competitive world, is not going alone; it is accompanied by sexism. We wanted to analyse how both sexism and androcentricity impact identity construction of elite women athletes. To this end, a case study with 33 Basque athletes has been carried out. There have been 19 in-depth interviews and three discussion groups have been carried out. It can be concluded, that sport currently functions as a biopolitical mechanism for the construction of gender identities. But to the extent that women athletes occupy the spaces previously vetoed for them, they are turning into reality the female sport and originating critical voices that demand both the equality of opportunities for the different genders and the dissolution of borders between them in the sport.