Age fraud in sport: An invisible topic in international sport sociology tailor-made for Asian social scientist Aurelien Boucher
The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shenzhen
Abstract
In recent years, the most cited international journal in the field of sports sociology and history (namely the International Review for the Sociology of Sport, The Journal of sport and social Issue, The Sociology of Sport Journal, the Journal of Sport History, and the International Journal for the History of Sport) have published a growing amount of articles dedicated to Sport in Asian societies and non-western world. As far as Asia is concerned, more than 100 articles containing the terms ^China^ or ^Chinese^ were published in the International Journal for the History of Sport between 2010 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2022, the International Review for the Sociology of Sport published 15 articles relating to sports in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.
This silent transformation of the literature landscape suggests at the first glance that the subaltern critic together with globalization and the circulation of knowledge have progressively influenced the topic of interest of sports social scientists and publications in the top international journals. Nonetheless, this paper will show that some social phenomena such as age fraud, which are apparently endemic in African and Asian countries remain almost undocumented. To be more specific, none of the journals mentioned above has ever published an article on this topic, while only two papers in English can be found in the academic literature.
Three reasons can explain such a phenomenon. First, the distinction usually made by sports social scientists between mass and elite sports and the focus on the most mediatized competitions may prevent them to investigate the youth elite competitions where age fraud can offer a great competitive advantage. Second, the specialists of deviance in sports are more likely to focus on match-fixing and doping practices because a large offer of subsidized research and publication opportunities exist for such topics. Third, it seems that sports institutions in countries like China or India are more likely to rely on technical solutions to try to tackle age fraud than to require the assistance of social scientists who can possibly shed light on the role of corrupted civil servants.
Keywords: Age fraud, Asian sport, deviance, invisibility
