The Future of Post-Human Sports: Towards a New Theory of Training and Winning

Are sports really supposed to be so competitive that, as Henry R. Sanders once famously said, Men, I'll be honest. Winning is...the only thing!? (WK 2012) This competitive view of sports can be contrasted with a critical view by William Shakespeare, who wrote in Othello (Act. iv. Sc. 1): They laugh that win. (BART 2012) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), sports (in relation to both training and winning) are neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Of course, this reexamination of the opposing views on the value of sports does not mean that sports are unimportant, or that those interdisciplinary fields (related to sports) like sports nutrition, physiology, psychology, biomechanics, sports philosophy, sports technology, anthropometry, kinanthropometry, performance analysis, physical therapy, sports science, and so on are not worth studying. Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of sports, especially in the dialectic context of training and winning--while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the modificative theory of sports) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. To understand this, the book is organized in four chapters. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about sports in relation to training and winning from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its post-human fate.