WAY back when, during the first lockdown, March ’20, Jonathan Liew wrote a brilliant column on small sport versus big sport. What Jonathan meant by “big sport” was what we watch on the TV. And “small sport?” What we do, a jog, a bike ride, a workout session via Youtube, can be done on our own, non-competitive, little or no kit required, cheap. 

It is “small sport” that has persisted through the pandemic while “big sport” has been cancelled, postponed, threatened with financial oblivion.

As a handbook for these curious conditions read Jurgen Martschukat’s timely The Age of Fitness. His argument is that the obsession with individual performance via “small” sport is emblematic of neoliberalism. Does the potential exist for a sporting counterculture? Yes, but first we have to understand sport cannot be reduced to a simple binary opposition, big bad sport v good small sport.