Speaker
Description
This paper takes as its point of departure how semi-professional sportswomen talk about their own alcohol use. Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with 21 sportswomen in three elite codes in Australian women’s sport: rugby league, netball and Australian Rules Football, the paper describes how these women narrated their own drinking, and its relationship to their sporting lives, throughout COVID-19. The cancellation of women’s sport in Australia meant the cancellation of income and identity. This financial and social precarity hit particularly hard those sportswomen who were vulnerable to some of the problems associated with alcohol use. The key themes articulated by the women of self-loathing and self-reproach, uncertainty and despair, and secrecy and surveillance surrounding their own drinking informs the paper’s analysis and shapes the broader recommendations for player wellbeing and welfare that stem from the data.
