A resonant Doughnut for sustainable youth elite sport

Compass to navigate between growth and well-being logic in the 21st century

Bibliographic Data

ID24228738
AuthorsBryan Charbonnet (0000-0002-8528-721X, University of Bern), Manuel Suter (0000-0003-0932-0951, Lund University), Christian Thue Bjørndal (0000-0001-8544-9816, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences), Sigmund Loland (0000-0003-1206-4098, Norwegian School of Sport Sciences), Noora J Ronkainen (0000-0003-3785-0458, University of Bern), Achim Conzelmann (0000-0001-7474-086X, University of Bern)
Year2026
Publication date2026-10-16
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Review for the Sociology of Sport (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1012-6902 • E-ISSN: 1461-7218
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/10126902261494684
LanguageEN
References cited86

Traditionally, youth elite sport has been created to help elite sport systems achieve growth in terms of performance results. After repeated concerns about well-being , it is now often seen as socially unsustainable . But what would a sustainable youth elite sport look like? To explore it, we draw on two perspectives beyond sport science: Kate Raworth's sustainability science Doughnut and Hartmut Rosa's relational sociology of the good life. Both address the same underlying problem as is found in sport: the pursuit of endless growth in finite systems. As will be analysed in this article, the escalatory logics of late modern Western societies produce an ecological crisis at the planetary level, an alienation crisis at the societal level and an ethical crisis in youth elite sport. The Doughnut framework is described as a compass to guide humanity out of the ecological crisis, while the concept of resonance offers a way to address the crisis of cultural and social alienation. Assuming that similar problems can inspire similar solutions, we combine these perspectives and develop the ‘resonant Doughnut’ for sustainable youth elite sport. Our model proposes resonance as a new normative ideal. It also opens three analytical spaces – resonance, critical degradation of youth elite sport and critical human deprivation – to define what sustainable youth elite sport is, and what it is not.

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