The Postdigital Athlete and The Ethics of XR Sport

This paper explores the emergence of Extended Reality (XR) within sport science through a postdigital and mnemohistorical lens. While XR technologies are often framed as solutions to long-standing concerns around ecological validity, this article argues that they do more than simulate performance environments. They participate in the selective remembering and stabilising of particular sporting pasts. Drawing on Assmann’s concept of cultural memory and Cohen’s ‘monster culture’, the paper develops the figure of the postdigital athlete as a way of understanding how expertise becomes distributed across bodies, data, and systems. Across discussions of ecological validity, data infrastructures, and perceptual-cognitive expertise, XR is approached as a site where memory, power, and embodiment converge. Simulated environments are shown to be curated ecologies shaped by institutional priorities, while datasets are understood as historically situated inscriptions that carry normative assumptions about performance. Expertise is reconfigured as an emergent effect of human and technological entanglement. In place of resolving methodological limitations, XR intensifies them in new ways. The paper argues for a more critically attuned engagement with XR that spotlights its role in shaping what sport is remembered to be and what it is allowed to become.