Game over: dissecting the overlooked health harms of modern sports

This article interrogates the “sport-health ideology” that equates organized sport with population wellbeing, arguing that it conflates the proven benefits of routine physical activity with the distinct injury profiles, labor relations, and political functions of modern sport. Synthesizing scholarship from sociology, public health, and bioethics, we show how elite and commercialized sport institutionalizes a culture of risk linked to musculoskeletal trauma, neurodegeneration, and normalized pain; embeds corporate sponsorships that promote unhealthy consumption; and operates through biopolitical regimes that intensify bodily manipulation for performance while denying comparable care to non-athlete publics. We trace the sport economy's dependence on precarious and exploitative labor, from collegiate exploitation to mega-event construction, and examine how patriotic pageantry and media partnerships constitute a “sport-security nexus” that aestheticizes U.S. militarism and its downstream health harms, including in Iraq and Gaza. We argue that sport bioethics must move beyond doping and concussion to treat labor rights, occupational and environmental standards, sponsorship governance, and demilitarization as first-order determinants of health. Redirecting investment toward low-risk, community-based movement, enforcing transparent safety surveillance across athletes and event workers, and severing ties with harmful industries are necessary to align sport with health justice.