How sport shapes our understanding of heritage and cultural identity

“There is little doubt that heritage is integral to sport, and sport is integral to heritage.” — Gregory Ramshaw

SPORT plays a critical role in our understanding of heritage and heritage tourism. In fact, there exists a strong connection between sport, heritage, and tourism.

Sport can be seen as a window into people’s culture, while cultural travellers have long journeyed for sport-related purposes. As such, sport-based travel can be viewed through the lens of heritage.

Sport halls of fame and museums, for example, have been examined in terms of their role in creating and disseminating the sporting past and their relationship to broader social, political, and economic agendas. Sports stadia and sporting venues have been explored as potential tourist attractions, their relationship in commodifying memory, their role in creating authentic experiences, and their part in constructing national identities.

Heritage-based sporting events have been explored as avenues for maintaining expressions of cultural identity, as creators of heritage-based place identities, as reflectors of heritage dissonance, as promoters of non-sport heritage, and as constructors of liminal heritages. Sport heritage has also been positioned as a form of secular pilgrimage, as a catalyst for diasporic travel, and as an avenue for memorialisation.

Sport heritage has further been explored regarding its unique management and conservation issues, its relationship to sport history, and its role in creating intangible legacies. The broad base of interdisciplinary research that has examined sport heritage, particularly in a relatively short period of time, demonstrates the powerful role sport plays in our understanding of heritage and heritage tourism.

In sum, as Gregory Ramshaw points out in his article, Heritage and Sport: An introduction, there is little doubt that heritage is integral to sport, and sport is integral to heritage. One could also say that heritage is integral to tourism, and tourism is central to heritage. In short, there are many issues at play in contemporary heritage literature, albeit through a sports lens, including contestation over memory and memorialisation, commodification and authenticity in heritage tourism, and the relationship between history and heritage.

Among the issues sport heritage focuses on are examples of:

• Tangible Immovable Sport Heritage: These include stadia, monuments, memorials and landscapes that cannot be relocated or authentically replicated anywhere else.
• Tangible Movable Sport Heritage: Which include museum/halls of fame exhibitions that are not permanently in situ and sporting events that are not tied to one particular location.
• Living Heritage: Interestingly, heritage sport also looks specifically at the heritage value attached to humans and animals. In doing so, it explores the concepts of athlete commodification, enshrinement, remembrance, recognition and legacy.
• Intangible Sport Heritage: There are also many forms of sport heritage that cannot be touched. These include the traditions, the smells, and one's personal sense of belonging (the intangibility of sports heritage).
• Institutional Heritage: Lastly, heritage sport looks at the many institutions (political, religious, and educational) attached to the delivery of regular sporting competitions and once-in-a-lifetime tournaments.

One intriguing aspect about heritage sport is its reference to the global consumption and conservation of sports-related heritage as a local commodity (for residents and tourists), marketers (sport and tourism-based) and resource managers.

While sport heritage, and the tourism it generates, shares many similarities to other forms of heritage, we are reminded that there are some very distinctive features to sport heritage, namely that much of the fabric of sport heritage — and, indeed, much of what attracts tourists to experience it — are the athletes themselves and the sporting feats they have achieved.

Few cultural processes are celebrated like sport, and few activities are as widely disseminated, replayed, and relived as sport. The heroes and the sporting moments they create then, become artefacts, and though we can relive and replay the achievement (and, in a sense, preserve the moment(s) in time, perhaps through both personal memory and vicariously through media) we cannot preserve “the object” in the same way that we might other forms of tangible heritage.

The relationship between achievement and the athlete, in fact, demonstrates a paradox in sports heritage. Athletes grow old, they change, and they are no longer what they were —indeed, athletes are some of the few heritage “objects” that are not aided by the patina of age. However, their achievements may become more glorious or heroic as time goes on.

Sport heritage at a museum is used as a means of revealing heritage as both a tool for collective pride and as an instrument for challenging dominant narratives. Many sport heritage narratives, particularly at museums and halls of fame, are about remembering great sporting achievements.

In order to commemorate athletes and sporting achievements, sports museums organise interviews and signature days for museum visitors to listen to the past matches, sporting achievements and performances of the athletes. With these activities, the opportunity to be together with the famous athletes of the time and the athletes who are currently active in sport encourages children and young people to do sport and makes a significant contribution to the formation of generations and raising national athletes.

Sport museums also organise athletes’ training and events where the spectators will be athletes themselves. Interactive exhibitions, mostly in sports museums, offer visitors the opportunity to “experience” a particular area of sport.

However, the role of sporting achievement often takes on a much broader social and political context. The capacity for heritage to reflect both positive and negative legacies is evident as the “sport heritage displayed at some museums is about anguish and revolution”.

In his book, Beyond a Boundary, CRL James reveals that sport — and, perhaps by extension, sport heritage — is a tool for both liberation and subjugation. Perhaps most importantly, these mixed sporting legacies are given a voice, reflecting the wider concern of “whose heritage” is being told and to what end.

Interactive exhibitions not only introduce specific sporting practices to visitors but can also inspire visitors to watch or start doing that sport, contributing to sustainable sport culture. Sporting venues, which inevitably include heritage, also promote sports culture.

Because sports heritage venues often emphasise the history of the sport or the team to sustain the legacy of the place and create a meaningful experience for the visitors. Stadium tours, which normally include areas of the site closed to the public, such as private suites, locker rooms, media centres and the playing surface, give a chance to see those places.

In his article, Sporting new attractions? The commodification of the sleeping stadium, S Gammon quotes from Stevens that: “The inherent appeal of stadia as special places where heroes play and legends are made gives them the type of attributes on which more recognized visitor attractions are based — atmosphere, sense of occasion, evocation and emotion… It is apparent that an important part of the appeal of the stadium as a visitor attraction is its potential to give visitors a real experience of ‘sport as heritage’.”

So tours offer to cross the symbolic boundaries that distinguish the worlds of the audience and the worlds of the athlete. This gives a chance to interiorise sport culture, offers people the opportunity to break boundaries and with curiosity about these special venues, causes an increase in number of visitors to stadiums and sports museums.

It also aims to enhance the number of sports museums and sports heritage venues. In England, for example, an increase in public interest and augmented visits gives way to the increasing number of special-purpose museums dedicated to particular sports or clubs. While the experience in the museum takes its place in the memories of the visitors, the pieces taken from the museum shop are the tangible bearers of this experience, and an element of sports culture is carried to the personal space/home.

There are also lots of sport events which contribute to strengthening collective sports memory. By reason of many annual or regular sporting events have a heritage component, which is often part of their appeal. For example, the Olympic Games pay homage to heritage, whether the ancient Games, the modern Games created by de Coubertin, or the records and heroes of Games past.

People watch and follow these special sport heritage-based events and reproduce sport memory and culture. Each branch of sport, which is a part of culture but is a cultural practice in itself, has its own history. The different sports branches meet the sports needs of individuals in different strata of society, and “the multidisciplinary/multi-domain relationships in the sport reflect the imagination existing in the human being and diversify our world”.

Sport museums, stadium tours and sporting venues, heritage-based sporting events et al. contribute to the continuity of sport culture while demonstrating this richness.

Similarly, if athletes are to be thought of as a “living heritage”, then we must understand them as a very dynamic heritage where their past successes will be determined by present needs, concerns, actions, and opinions. Star athletes still competing today are frequently judged as to their potential “legacy” — that they might help to shape and determine where they and their achievements might fit in the pantheon of a sport’s heritage — and that there is an understanding that future behaviour may colour opinions about sport-related legacies.

In many respects, and for many athletes, maintaining a legacy — and having a saleable heritage pedigree — is vital for their post-athletics career, and not just for the vast sports memorabilia market, but also as commodities for the heritage sport tourism market as well.

As Gregory Ramshaw points out in his editorial piece, Sport, Heritage, and Tourism, sport heritage can reflect and illuminate many of the issues, challenges, and debates in heritage and heritage tourism. At other times, sport heritage appears to be a very distinct form of heritage, perhaps because of its broad dissemination and consumption, though perhaps more because of its corporal nature.

We have to continue to play sports, or support those who play, in order to create a future sports heritage. The fact that sport heritage often does not fossilise, that it must continue to be made and remade through play and performance, is perhaps what gives it a distinctive place in the heritage and heritage tourism landscape.

Sustainability will succeed when all people meet their basic needs and desires for good living, the quality of life increases, in addition ecosystems and species are allowed to renew themselves, the planet’s life support systems are protected and these conditions are guaranteed for the next generation. Therefore, the legacy of the systems created by the society has great importance.

There is a transfer of values through socially constructed sports. While one aspect of these values transfer is the passing of social values to sports, the other aspect is the transfer of sport values, some sort of sporting values, to the society. In other words, while sport forms culture, it is also shaped by the culture, that is to say sport is the carrier of culture.

Since culture is a heritage transferred to new generations, it includes sport as it does with all the values carried from the past to the present. Therefore, each society has a sports heritage that should be preserved and exhibited in relation to its own sport history. Like all elements of culture, sport culture is transferred from the past to the present and can be passed on to new generations.

In order for the sports culture to be sustainable, it is necessary to carry the sports heritage to the next generations. In this sense, sport heritage, which started to accumulate along with the history of mankind, is presented to society, assumes important functions in creating a sustainable sports culture.

* Dr Vusi Shongwe works in the Department of Sport, Arts, and Culture in KwaZulu-Natal and writes in his personal capacity.

** The views expressed here do not reflect those of the Sunday Independent, Independent Media or IOL.