Olympic dreams and neoliberal realities: The subjectivation of Brazilian athletes in high-performance sports

Abstract

This study examines how Brazilian Olympians internalize, negotiate, and at times resist neoliberal discourses while navigating meritocratic ideals and the pressures of high-performance sport. Drawing on qualitative semi-structured interviews with eight athletes from Santa Catarina who competed in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, we analyze how neoliberal rationalities shape both their practices and subjectivities. Interviews conducted between 2021 and 2022 explored athletes’ career trajectories, Olympic participation, and reflections on their experiences at Rio 2016. Grounded in Foucauldian theory, the analysis develops three interconnected themes. The first examines how athletes engage with neoliberal values, particularly the entanglement of meritocracy and performance that frames the Olympics as the pinnacle of sporting achievement. The second theme mobilizes Foucault's notion of neoliberal governmentality and Christiaens’ (2019) expansion of the “entrepreneur of the self” to show how athletes embody entrepreneurial traits such as disciplined rationality, alertness to opportunity, and strategic tolerance of uncertainty. The third theme considers how athletes internalize high-performance values by framing their trajectories through merit and self-reliance in constructing their Olympian identities. Together, these findings reveal an ambivalent interplay between neoliberal conditions and individual agency, demonstrating that athletes’ subjectivities are shaped through both the reproduction of and resistance to neoliberal discourses.