Abstract

This paper offers a critical reappraisal of the sport ethic through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Building on the foundational work of Hughes and Coakley (1991), the sport ethic is defined as a normative framework, which compels athletes to pursue excellence through sacrificial commitment, self-discipline, tolerance, and a refusal to accept limitation. Though celebrated, ultimately, athletic subjectivity is legitimatised through practices that are harmful to an athlete’s health, identity, and social relations. Whereas existing critiques of the sport ethic have focused on its normative demands, this paper shifts the analysis from identity and ideology to the role of desire. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is argued that while athletes, and fans, are socialised into an overconformity with the sport ethic, such adherence is sustained via the subject’s desire for the very sacrifices it requires. This desire is not reducible to rational intention or external coercion but is instead sustained through forms of unconscious enjoyment (jouissance), in the form of self-sabotage, bodily harm, or the pursuit of impossible ideals. On this basis, the paper challenges moralising accounts that treat overconformity as a correctable pathology or failure of awareness, insisting instead that an ongoing adherence to the sport ethic must be conceived in relation to the sacrifices and excesses it posits. The paper concludes by calling for a renewed ethical relation to sport—one that does not seek to eliminate desire or resolve contradiction, but to critically inhabit them. By recognising that desire is not a flaw but constitutive of the subject, the paper opens a space for resisting blind conformity to the sport ethic through confronting the impossible demands that give it meaning. In doing so, a new way of approaching sport, beyond utility, identity, or moral virtue, is provided.