Future Time

Abstract

Chapter 5 looks at how the future and its promises are lived in the present in sport and at how the future relates to the present and the past in relation to sporting performances. Futures are explored in relation to predictions and possibilities, for example as they involve generation and aging and damaged embodied athletes. There are enfleshed restrictions of performance that constrains the promise of futures as well as technologies which create new opportunities, as in the Paralympics. Power and agency underpin these debates. The 2012 Olympics were at various points described as ‘women’s time’ and, in the context of the Spice girls’ reprise of their first hit Wannabe which purportedly introduced the notion of girl power, at the Closing Ceremony, the ‘girls’ games’. The enormous success of women’s sporting activities at the Games and the operation of different power mechanisms based on divisions of sex gender in sport make the concept of ‘women’s time’ an interesting political device for exploring temporality, especially in the field of sport, but with much wider application.