On existential risk in elite sport

This essay develops an account of existential risk in elite sport through Karl Jaspers’s concepts of housing and limit-situation. Housing initially stabilises the athlete’s relation to the demands of elite performance and offers protection from the existential ambivalence characteristic of elite sport. Yet, in its rigidified form, housing takes on a naïve faith, constricts the range of meaningful possibilities, generates affective dissonance, and resists revision in the face of limit-situations. Consequently, when athletes encounter limit-situations such as injury, failure, or retirement, the breakdown of this structure may intensify to forms of suffering. Drawing on the concrete examples of burnout, depression, anxiety disorder, and disordered relations to the body in elite sport, the paper advances the theorisation of existential risk proposed here.