Speakers
Description
The war in Ukraine has brought the demand for “energy sobriety” to the forefront of the media and into the daily lives of Europeans. In this specific context, the objective of “less” or “without” appears as a constraint imposed on citizens. Nevertheless, in other contexts, the search for sobriety can be a self-determined choice, desired and claimed. This is particularly true in the field of sports, following the example of the French community of Ultra-Light Walkers who practice itinerant hiking and advocate a drastic reduction in the weight of their backpacks (Boutroy, 2022). For our part, we are interested in sportsmen and women evolving in minimalist modalities of running (via a voluntary withdrawal of the connected watch, a detachment from the heavy shoe and/or a refusal to register for large-scale competitions) and bodybuilding (as in the context of participation in the StrongFirst school advocating a barefoot practice, without protective equipment and organized around an extremely limited number of movements). Based on mobile interviews conducted with twenty amateur sportsmen and women engaged in these desired forms of sobriety, we shed light on the intimate, political and philosophical meanings they assume. These result from varied trajectories, oscillating between dispositional continuity and point of bifurcation. Finally, we show that, depending on the athlete, intentional sports sobriety can be an isolated practice or part of a genius global lifestyle turned towards rusticity.
