"Running bodies" under the lens of Michel Foucault

Kannykin Stanislav Vladimirovich PhD in Philosophy Associate professor of the Department of Humanities at Stary Oskol Technological Institute named after A. Ugarov, branch of National University of Science and Technology "MISIS" 309516, Russia, Belgorod Region, Stary Oskol, micro district Makarenko, 42 stvk2007@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The legacy of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a French historian, cultural critic and philosopher, has been fruitfully mastered for several decades by representatives of various fields of philosophy and sociology of sports. Turning to American, Canadian and British studies, we agree with the opinion that "the importance of understanding the patterns of the English-language reception of Foucault's works is dictated by the fact that it now forms the academic canon, sets ideological, methodological, thematic patterns for researchers in various parts of the scientific world" ^{[1, pp. 48-49]}.

First of all, I would like to mention the fundamental work of Pirkko Marcula and Richard Pringle "Foucault, sport and exercise. Power, Knowledge and self-transformation" ^[2], which contains Fucoldian interpretations of relationships in sports and fitness culture of the body, power and identity, as well as an analysis of the construction of sports social practices. It explores the ways in which "athletic bodies" comprehend the social forces that influence them, and fitness and sports are interpreted by the authors as an expression of freedom and a platform for social change. Brian Pronger's voluminous study ^[3] with the provocative title "Bodily fascism: Salvation through physical training technologies" also attracts attention, where the author, using (and at the same time often problematizing) extensive material from the works of M. Foucault, substantiates his main idea: the energy of the body is vulnerable to various forms of exploitation and subordination, but its salvation in the potential of transcendence that sports possess.

The work of David Andrews ^[4] is based on an approach that reveals the biopolitical constitution of human experience. This substantiates the author's thesis that M. Foucault's genealogy can be fruitfully applied in line with the philosophical criticism of sports. The publication by John Hargreaves ^[5] shows that control over the appearance, treatment and functioning of the body (including sports) is a universally important aspect of the social order, and the development and improvement of such forms of control have played a decisive role in the emergence and development of modern social formations. The article by Jean Harvey and Genevieve Reil ^[6] demonstrates how the key concepts of M. Foucault ("episteme", "discipline", "bio-power", "observation", "panopticism", "gaze", "technologies of the self", "subjectivation") were used in the English-speaking and French-speaking sociology of sports societies, revealing various aspects of their social existence. Pirkko Marcula ^[7] refers to the works of M. Foucault to explore how in them the materiality of the body and physical movement are intertwined with social analysis. Richard Pringle ^[8] compares the theoretical tools borrowed from the works of A. Gramsci and M. Foucault in terms of their use for the study of sports and masculinity, based on the assumption that the concept of masculine hegemony is based on a special understanding of power.

Since the subject of the author's interest in this article are the socio-cultural aspects of various running practices, the works of researchers studying through the prism of M. Foucault's views the technologies of power and self in the training and competitive activities of "running bodies" are of particular importance for this work. First of all, it should be noted publications that give Fucoldian interpretations of the relationship between a coach and a runner athlete, where elements of anatomical and biopolitics are visibly manifested, mediated by various discourses. These are articles by Jim Denison, Joseph Mills, Timothy Konoval, Richard Pringle, Tanya Cassidy and Paul Hessian ^{[9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]}, which shows how overly controlling training practices can objectify athletes' bodies and, as a result, limit their development, and also suggests less limiting the freedom and initiative of athletes-runners, but at the same time quite effective disciplinary techniques that allow athletes to simultaneously improve their athletic performance and show Fucoldian "self-care", forming themselves as ethical subjects.

Luke Jones, Zoe Avner, Jim Denison ^[15] apply M. Foucault's conceptual apparatus to analyze the changing attitudes towards sports of runners who have finished performing at the highest level and are in search of a new identity; William Bridell and Genevieve Reil ^[16] explore discourses about physical activity, running and the dominant ideas about the male body of marathon runners belonging to the homosexual community. David and Jennifer Jones devoted their research to the diet of athletes to show how this aspect of discursive practice is refracted through various technologies of power as a means of domination and "technology of self" as a means of transforming athletes ^[17]; the problems of digital surveillance of athletes attracted the attention of Andrew Manley and Sean Williams ^[18]. Note that all these publications have not been previously presented in Russian and further in the article quotes from them are given in the translation of its author.

A number of Russian scientists have also shown interest in combining M. Foucault's concepts and the topical issues of socio-cultural conditioning of sports practices. The works of V.I. Belozerov ^[19], where the concepts of French and German sociology of sports are analyzed, including those considering some aspects of sports construction of physicality; M. A. Bogdanova ^[20], revealing the factors and mechanisms of sports as a social technique through which the transformation of the human biological body into a "social body" takes place, turned out to be significant for our research; D. Kurakin ^[21], developing the cultural sociology of the body based on the ideas of E. Durkheim and his followers, which include M. Foucault; I. M. Bykhovskaya ^[22], considering the relationship between the concepts of "physical culture" and "body culture", as well as analyzing certain modern bodily practices, including sports, and problems generated by the increasing possibilities of influencing the bodily aspects of human existence. At a high methodological level, A. A. Voronin explores the problems of combining the bodily and mental in the understanding of physical culture ^[23]; convincingly substantiates the possibility of separating the sociology of the body into an independent scientific direction by D.A. Starostin ^[24]; the influence of modern technologies on the formation of modern biopolitics in relation to physical culture and sports is explicated by O. V. Popov ^[25]; philosophical E. V. Shemyakina presents the analysis of the concept of "body discipline" in her article ^[26]; A. Makarychev and S. Medvedev base their analysis of the doping situation in modern Russian sports on the convergence of anatomical politics and M. Foucault's biopolitics as two types and methods of control and regulation ^[27].

The analysis of the reception of M. Foucault's ideological legacy by foreign and Russian researchers reveals the difference between this study and similar ones, which consists in greater coverage (as far as possible within the framework of one article) by the conceptual apparatus of the French philosopher of the socio-cultural aspects of the existence of sports running practices and, accordingly, achieving a more voluminous vision of the formation of the "social body" of an athlete by means of anatomical and biopolitics. This was reflected in the formulation and solution of such research tasks as explication of the types and features of disciplinary practices used in the training of athletes specializing in running sports; analysis of the manifestations of resistance and transgression of runners; research of ethical self-transformation of runners within the framework of Fucoldian "technologies of selfhood", as well as identification of some urgent and emerging problems of running sports related to relationships power, control, body and knowledge.

The author of this work also attempts to give some applied meaning to the Fucoldian interpretations of power relations in the "coach ? athlete" system. It is obvious that in modern Russian sports, running disciplines are in deep stagnation. Suffice it to say that the last Olympic victory for Russian male runners happened exactly 20 years ago, and the statistics of the results of the world's leading runners and runners for 2023 do not leave us even the slightest hope of a podium at the world's largest competitions. There are many reasons for this crisis, but one of them is the unpopularity of running specialization (especially long-distance running) among Russian children. The fact is that running training for medium and long distances is mainly aimed at stimulating metabolic adaptation by running segments of a certain length with a speed set by the trainer. And so, for most of the training, the children "roll the segments", and then perform special running exercises and engage in general physical training. They are made into "obedient bodies" moving strictly in one direction (counterclockwise), limited by the lines of the stadium tracks, with strict timing, constant heart rate monitoring, and equipment control, and all this happens strictly within the framework of repetitive cycles. The coach's orders are never questioned, and discipline is proclaimed the main virtue of a young athlete. Are there many children who want to train in such an environment, especially since the same thing awaits them every day at school? Western sports researchers, whose work is presented in the review, are looking for a wide variety of ways to undermine this anatomical and political power (some of these ways are presented below) in order to problematize and regularly violate the disciplinary mechanisms underlying training. This is done so that athletes are constantly faced with new challenges, to which they must quickly adapt in order to learn how to better control their development and be actively involved in the training process, and not objects of the coach's imperious manipulations in the form of an obedient body. At the same time, the coach himself is constantly developing, since training and his personality acquire a procedural nature that can be constantly reinvented and in changing contexts. It seems to us that this approach is very important for the development of Russian cross-country sports.

Disciplinary practices in the training of athletes-runners

The physical culture and sports context of the bodily existence of a modern person arouses a special philosophical interest in the phenomenological, existential and social experience of a moving body ^[28], since "a moving body <...> affects the organization of the entire space, corporate imperatives and a variety of identity policies (related to gender, race, social classes, etc.). It expresses vitality in its productive and physiological characteristics, moves a complex economic system, acts as an important part of cultural identities and various political practices" ^{[22, p. 103]}; "by moving, the body creates its own reality. Movement is the primordial logos of the real for us, the incarnated. Pigeons apparently can't see if they're not moving, which is why they shake their heads back and forth when they walk. Similarly, we do not "see" reality without motion. If we don't move, we're not there. For us, there is no reality without our own movements" ^{[3, p. 80]}.

In sports, a moving body is primarily a running body, since many sports disciplines are based on this type of locomotion, and during the training process, running, unlike other types of movement, is used almost universally, developing not only speed, endurance and coordination, but also psychological personality traits important for sports. It is also important to note that stayer running is the most widespread modern type of amateur sport, which is practiced by hundreds of millions of people on all continents, and prestigious running competitions (in particular, marathons –"majors") are the most representative events on a global scale in terms of the number of participants, where tens of thousands of stayers of different age, gender and other status groups start in "waves" in one race.

It should be borne in mind that the "runner's body" is the same social construct as the "ballet body", "swimmer's body", "bodybuilder's body" or "fitonyashka's body". All of them are the unity of the natural component ("flesh" according to M. Merleau-Ponty), the results of its transformation using various methods and technologies ("cultural body") and to some extent embodied in this body of socio-cultural standards, which are focused on transforming the flesh activity ("social body") ^{[22, 24]}.

The embodied agent of the formation of such a body, concentrating many power lines of power, is a coach who directs the behavior of an athlete, including outside of sports practices, since many coaches are confident that they should control the athlete's life as much as possible and know him better than the athlete knows himself: "Alex (coach's name begunov – S.K.) once stated: "I can tell you, after reading the first line of the morning message from my leading athlete, what phase of the menstrual cycle she is in" ^{[13, p. 146]}; "Aaron (the name of the runners' coach is S.K.)  He described his approach this way: "Returning to my athletes: I probably have more Excel spreadsheets with their data than NASA has, sending someone to the moon" ^{[13, p. 143]}.

What kind of power lines are we talking about? In M. Foucault's terminology, they are called "discourses". Noting the difficulty of unambiguously defining this concept, M. Foucault argues about it as follows: "... I was referring to the general area of all statements, then a group of statements that can be individualized, then an established practice explaining a certain number of statements" ^{[29, p. 160]}. Using the example of training runners for high-performance sports, discourses (examples are given in parentheses) include documents expressing state policy ("Strategy for the Development of physical culture and Sports in the Russian Federation for the period up to 2030"); texts of academic science (L. P. Matveev's classic work "Fundamentals of Sports Training"); sports periodicals publications (Athletics and Runner's World magazines), popular science texts (the book by Olympic champion in 5 and 10 km running V. P. Kutz "From beginner to Master of Sports"), as well as films, works of art, legends, myths, popular beliefs, etc., concerning sports running. D. Y. Kurakin quite rightly notes that "... any discourse turns out to be permeated with immanent power relations, which gives the key to solving the forced effect of discourse on the body" ^{[21, p. 66]}.  Scientific texts have a special symbolic power (P. Bourdieu) over trainers, since in them, unlike political programs, imperatives of power are hidden behind a screen of impartial objectivity: "the legitimacy of science is achieved precisely by hiding the power relations that are its source.  The effectiveness of scientific texts is the ability to commit violence, creating the necessary perception of reality, forcing people to believe in this reality and hiding the fact that they (texts ? S.K.) do it" ^{[3, p. 52]}. It is also important to emphasize that all of the above are not just texts, they are theoretical (in a broad sense) foundations of various methods of social construction of an effective running body, these are ways of forming practices.  

Hence M. Foucault's formulation of another task, "... which does not consist ? no longer consists ? in considering discourses as sets of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations), but consists in considering them as practices that systematically form the objects they speak about. Of course, discourses are made up of signs; but what they themselves do is more than using these signs to denote things. And this is more, which makes them irreducible neither to language nor to speech. This is the "more" that needs to be shown and described" ^{[29, pp. 111-112, italics of the source]}. The discursive practices ("discipline tools") carried out in the field of runner training primarily include:

? training plans that largely regulate the life of a runner in the form of "detailed supervision", since "discipline is the political anatomy of a detail" ^{[30, p. 203]}. This leads to the fact that "the training schedule that the coach writes to me determines everything in my life: my plans for the evening and morning, my weekend schedule, the place and time of my vacation, and even who I will or will not communicate with" [Akhmedova O. Running towards myself.  About marathons, life and hope. M. : Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2023. p. 21]);

 - running exercises related to the improvement of the runner's physical body on the basis of subordination to the will of the coach as a bearer of power / knowledge and understood in the light of M. Foucault's views as "elements of the political technology of the body" ^{[11, p.3]}: "The action is divided into elements. The position of the body, limbs, and joints is determined. For each movement, the direction, scope, duration are provided, and the sequence of its execution is prescribed" ^{[30, pp. 221-222]};

- organization of training time and space: running exercises involve such disciplinary practices as the distribution of runners by the coach in a clearly segmented arena or stadium space, where the athlete performs dozens of repetitions of monotonous movements during training, which leads him not only to physical, but also to psychological fatigue from monotony. The coach sets the schedule of classes, the time to overcome a particular distance and determines the rest intervals, stages, rhythms and exercise cycles, while in a limited time you need to do as much as possible, so a running coach is always a person with a stopwatch as an attribute of power over the time of classes.  In "To supervise and punish. The Birth of Prison" by M. Foucault describes the time parameters of activity control in this way: the distribution of working time; the detail of action in time; the correlation of body and gesture to save time, so as not to waste it on words. Thus, the time of performing exercises also becomes a means of disciplining and subordinating "running bodies": "time penetrates into the body, and with it all kinds of detailed control exercised by the authorities" ^{[30, p. 222]};

? "hierarchical supervision", when the runners are watched by a coach (for example, riding a bike behind a group of stayers), his assistants, then the group watches each of its members, and the runner still constantly controls himself. "Through hierarchical supervision, for example, a coach can introduce additional training for the unfit, refresher classes for the unskilled, and exercises to punish latecomers. Thus, hierarchical observation reflects the relationship between visibility and power: the visible body ? this is a cognizable body, which can later become an object of influence of power" ^{[2, p. 41]};

? "normalizing judgments": for example, coach's remarks and judgments that adjust running technique and tactics or evaluate an athlete's lifestyle in light of the possibility of achieving the set goals. Thus, coaches act not only as bearers of disciplinary authority, but also as agents of normalization;

? "recognition": conversations of a coach with athletes "heart to heart", consolation or motivation ? an analogue of pastoral practices as an appeal for help and assessment to an "expert" ? a carrier of special, non-trivial knowledge, by virtue of which he is given the right to "forgive and resolve". M. Foucault thus connects "recognition", cognition and the authorities: "So, we will start from what could be called "local centers" of power-knowledge, such as, for example, the relationship that ensues between a penitent sinner and a confessor, or between a believer and a mentor. Here ? and under the sign of the "flesh" to be subdued ? various forms of discourse: testing oneself, interrogations, confessions, interpretations, conversations ? in the course of incessant movement back and forth transport various forms of subordination and schemes of cognition" ^{[31, pp. 199-200]};

- "exam" is any competition, as well as testing ("test run") of the physical and psychological conditions of athletes. The "exam" can be considered both as the most important means of individualization, and as a control of the effectiveness of all disciplinary practices (therefore it is often ritualized), proving the effectiveness of sports transformation of the body, however, the qualifications of not only the athlete, but also the coach are checked here. The super goal of the "exam" in sports is a record.

Thus, runner training is a rational and predictable process of performing a set of exercises based on the most detailed plan, assembled in a certain sequence, it is a functional practice based on scientifically sound principles of training in a "panopticon" situation and aiming to make obedient bodies as productive as possible.

The revealed "discipline tools" used to train athlete runners are still actively used in almost all disciplining organizations, especially vividly and clearly manifested in prisons and the army. It is interesting to note that interval training, which is the basis of training in endurance running, was first used in the army environment: "Reindell and Gershler (doctors who are usually considered pioneers of interval training) were instructed to very quickly get into shape the soldiers of the Austrian army, who in 1939 were preparing for war. That's where interval training came from. They had thousands of army recruits, they conducted interval training and found that they could significantly increase the maximum V02 (oxygen consumption – CC) of soldiers in six weeks. Now, since Gershler was also an athletics coach, he thought he could use this knowledge with his athletes" ^{[13, p. 139]}. It is important to add that often great runners came from an ultra-disciplinary, military environment built on a rigid hierarchy of power, for example, Olympic champions Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek, Vladmir Kutz and Abebe Bikila. Using their example, we can better understand M. Foucault's well-known judgment: "We must once and for all stop describing the manifestations of power in negative terms: it supposedly "excludes", "suppresses", "censors", "extracts", "masks", "hides". In fact, power produces. It produces reality; it produces realms of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that can be obtained about the individual belong to its products" ^{[30, p. 284]}.

Resistance and transgressions of runners

However, one should not forget that in addition to the processes of submission and transformation into an "obedient body", M. Foucault is also interested in the processes of confrontation with power, which he describes using the terms "technologies of the self (in other translations – "technologies of self", "technologies of "I")" and "subjectivation". Unlike another form of domination, violence, "... power is organized according to two requirements <...>: the "other" (the one who experiences power) must be recognized and preserved to the end as the subject of action; a whole field of possible responses, reactions, consequences, inventions must open up before the relations of power" ^{[14, p. 180]}. One of these answers is the struggle against power, which aims not to free oneself from it, which is impossible in principle in such a complex system as society, but to increase the freedom of the individual within its framework. In the work "The subject and power" ^{[32, pp. 161-190]} M. Foucault distinguishes three types of such struggle: opposition to forms of domination (for example, ethnic, social and religious); opposition to exploitation, i.e. the separation of the individual from what he produces; as well as the most relevant for modernity opposition to everything that binds the subject to himself to himself, thereby ensuring his subordination to others. Power, according to M. Foucault, does not force fatally, therefore anyone experiencing an overbearing influence has certain degrees of freedom in reacting to it. For example, an athlete may express displeasure with the coach's decisions, refuse to perform some exercises or instructions, in protest not to give his best at competitions, eventually leave for another mentor or leave the sport altogether. The French philosopher emphasizes that "... in power relations, there must be the possibility of resistance, since if there were no possibility of resistance ? resistance by violence, flight, cunning, strategies that turn the situation around ? power relations would not exist at all" ^{[32, pp. 257-258]}.

John Bale suggests differentiating opposition to dominant social attitudes into resistance and transgression. The difference between them is that the first acts as "an action against some unloved entity with the intention of changing or weakening its influence" ^{[33, p. 209]}, and D. Bale understands the second as going beyond the boundaries of normality, which sometimes happens unintentionally.  Examples of "unloved entities" can be political regimes, ideologies, sports officials, doping, drugs, etc. So, during the award ceremony at the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City On October 16, 1968, two African-American athletes, Tommy Smith and John Carlos, who won gold and bronze medals in the 200 meters, respectively, during the performance of the US national anthem, while on the podium, raised his fists in a black glove and did not lower his hands until the end of the anthem. It is also worth noting that they participated in the races at this Olympics exclusively in black socks.  It was their protest against the oppression of African Americans in the United States, one of the most outspoken and famous political statements in the history of modern The Olympic Games. Another example: German runner Otto Peltzer (1900-1970), holder of three world records in middle-distance running, who defeated the legendary Paavo Nurmi, the national hero of Germany, in front of the Berlin public, did not hide his homosexuality (which for the Nazis was tantamount to a confession of degeneracy and was punished in accordance with paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code), openly He criticized the Reichsportkommissar and published articles in the emigrant media against the fascist regime. For this, he was stripped of his German citizenship, sentenced to prison, and then placed in a concentration camp, where he stayed until the end of the war, miraculously surviving.  Resistance is also evident in the actions of Hassiba Bulmerka, the Algerian Olympic champion in 1992 in the 1500 m, who was bullied in her homeland and received death threats for not meeting the standards of a Muslim woman, exposing her body too much in training and competitions, but did not stop running practices, although outside Algeria, providing stimulating influence on the processes of women's emancipation in Islamic states.

Examples of transgression include the first victories of Africans over Europeans in middle- and long-distance running.  The fact is that "in the early 1950s, the prevailing opinion in the West was that African athletes, like African Americans, had great speed but little endurance" ^{[33, p. 224]}, therefore, medium and long running was considered the lot of Caucasian athletes, personified by Scandinavian and Slavic runners. However, Algerian Alain Mimoun became the Olympic champion in the marathon in 1956, and Ethiopian Abebe Bikila in 1960.  Another manifestation of transgression is the famous photograph of the winner of nine Olympic gold medals, the outstanding sprinter Carl Lewis, who starred in an advertisement for Pirelli tires in the image of an athlete starting running from a low start and wearing women's high-heeled shoes. The inscription on the photo reads:  "Power is nothing without control." This ironic advertisement, of course, significantly expands the boundaries of ideas about what is acceptable in the context of brutal heterosexual masculinity. Also, transgression can include the victories of pacemakers (in the jargon of track and field athletes – "hares"), whose task is to "lead" a certain runner along the distance to the desired result, and then get off or lag behind in order to enable the slave to perform successfully. Pacemakers, as a rule, earn money from this.  However, there is a known case of Elijah Mbogo, a "hare" from Kenya, who was supposed to help his compatriot Amos Matui win the Singapore Marathon in 2007, but eventually won the race himself.

To sum up, we note that there are many points of resistance that modify and change the course of power relations, of course, without completely removing the subject from them. Athletes-runners inevitably find themselves in a network of historically conditioned power relations, through which they are subjected to normalization and control, but at the same time they are free to constitute themselves as subjects influencing others, based on the use of counter-capabilities of the same power relations. This twofold process, according to M. Foucault, connects the runner with his identity through conscience or self-knowledge, i.e. identities are formed through constant reflection on oneself and recognition of one's problems, which M. Foucault calls self-interpretation, "hermeneutics of the self" or "hermeneutics of the subject" ^[33]. This means learning to recognize the discourses of power, understand the mechanism of their work on the basis of problematization, and then analyze your actions within their framework.  Thus, an athlete learns to see himself both as an object and as a subject of power relations, becomes able to realize how, while engaged in sports activities, he comprehends his human essence and his identities.

The work of athletes-runners on themselves within the framework of "technologies of the self"

The weakening of the dominance of power opens up additional opportunities for the athlete to self-actualize, for example, in the form of constructing himself as an ethical subject. This is the most important dimension of an athlete's existence, since competitive activity is organized in the field of behavioral norms and rules, i.e. in the ethical plane. Improving himself as a moral being, according to M. Foucault, an athlete must first understand the ethical code of sports activity (which is unequivocally prohibited (for example, doping); which of the non-prohibited is "good" (sharing water with an opponent at a marathon distance) and "bad" (giving up his turn to lead a group of runners in a long run); how to transform oneself in order to comply with the ethical code as much as possible, without becoming its slave, i.e. choosing from a variety of ways to "behave morally" the most organic for oneself. M. Foucault identifies four aspects of self-transformation: ethical substance, method of subordination, ethical work and telos ^{[31, 35, 36, 37]}.

The ethical substance is the part of the subject that should be subject to "self–improvement". For example, a runner may question such a part of his athletic identity as individualism or even selfishness, which, as he believes, creates a bad reputation for him and hinders further athletic development. Running is an individual sport that does not develop, unlike team sports, the ability to empathize and the skill of mutual support. "The bitter truth is that compassion and attentiveness to others is not what should be expected from those who experience only seconds and minutes" [Akhmedova O. Running towards herself.  About marathons, life and hope. M. : Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2023. p. 277].

Methods of submission are rules or tools ("ascetics"), by accepting them or using them, the athlete intends to correct the situation, for example, communicate more with other runners, participate in joint training, provide assistance with advice, equipment, etc., emotionally support other athletes at competitions, engage in charitable activities, etc.

Ethical work is the repeated reproduction, development and adaptation to specific situations of practices related to the method of submission.

Telos is the goal of ethical work on oneself, which can be to improve one's image, get more sponsorship, maximize the extension of a sports career or the desire to become a more "high–quality" person.

Thus, in ethical work, the main focus is on transforming oneself (and not the code of conduct) into an ethical subject through self-reflection and ascetic practices, while the individual does not go beyond the limits of ethical discourse, but transforms into it, improving his quality and position. It is important to note that in order to work on oneself, according to M. Foucault, first of all one should realize the limitations of one's sports identity, and then select freedom practices to overcome them. These practices require "ethical self-care, which is actualized in self-aestheticization: an individual who is critically aware of the disciplinary impact of dominant sports discourses on his identity actively decides to change himself and, forming a more aesthetic self, promotes ethical practices that use power with a minimum of dominance" ^{[2, p. 153]}. In this case, taking care of oneself also becomes taking care of others: forming a perfect body in the training process, the athlete combines the aesthetic and ethical using "technologies of himself", moving towards the ideal of M. Foucault's much?loved ancient culture - kalokagatia.  

M. Foucault's ideological legacy and some problems of modern running sports

M. Foucault's research makes it possible to use new tools to understand the essence of sports practices determined by a historically determined set of discourses (episteme), which represent arenas for the implementation of anatomical and biopolitics, techniques of discipline and normalization, panoptic control and self-objectification. In the Fucoldian field of ideological tension "power/knowledge – sport – body", the political, racial and gender aspects of sports activities, as well as topics related to doping, eiblism, ageism, eugenics and "posthuman" technologies combining the sports body with artificial objects, receive new coverage.

Next, we will briefly consider some current and emerging problems of running sports related to the relationship of power, control, body and knowledge within the framework of anthropopolitics and biopolitics.    

1. Running addiction. This problem most often affects amateur athletes (for example, running a marathon faster than three hours), whose attitude to sports is called "semi-professional": the results of such runners are very far from world records, but they treat running as a "serious leisure activity", devoting much more effort, attention and funds to training than necessary just to keep fit. Running addiction is talked about when this kind of activity becomes the main supplier of endorphins, an amateur runner goes to training with untreated injuries, he puts personal running activities and related needs (for example, financial) above the urgent problems of his family members. Deprived of the opportunity to train the way he sees fit, the runner faces "withdrawal" symptoms, including irritability, aggressiveness, anxiety and depression. As O. Akhmedova writes, "there is nothing wrong with running, but if running becomes the goal of existence and a person cannot think about anything else and live by nothing else, then such dependence is a biopsychosociospiritual disease" [Akhmedova O. Running towards oneself.  About marathons, life and hope. M. : Mann, Ivanov and Ferber, 2023. pp. 56-57].

As it seems to us, amateur running  ? This is a way of short-term, largely illusory, but liberation from the hardships and routine of everyday life, achieving peace, activating creative potential, entering streaming states of consciousness. But in the case under consideration, it turns into its opposite, becoming a way of "... subordination to the modernist desire for sovereignty and salvation in a life that is described as essentially insufficient" ^{[3, p. 225]}. The modern running industry, designed for the mass consumer, is part of the imperious project of managing people as resources and exploiting them. The accumulation of "physical capital" by amateur runners is carefully controlled by official recognition and taking into account "personal records" (PB), according to which runners are ranked and gain access to prestigious races.  Supporting the impersonal, non–centered power that permeates the relationship of runners, the constant desire to improve RV is another way to make people obedient and disciplined subjects, whose slogan in stayer running is the phrase "no pain– no result." Here, "pain" becomes a metaphor for sacrificing the discourses of modernity, which are vividly expressed in sports, the fullness of one's life, and sometimes the happiness of loved ones.

2. Strengthening control over runners with the help of technical means.  Today, it is impossible to imagine a runner-athlete without specialized gadgets that transmit information about training and competitions through applications to computers. As a rule, these gadgets are sports watches with functions (depending on the type and price) of a heart rate monitor, accelerometer, VO2 max measurement, cadence calculation (step frequency), GPS-based location display in real time, determining the pace and distance of running. A.V. Kylasov quite reasonably believes that many natural skills Currently, "... should be combined with the confident use of navigation gadgets and the promising possibility of remote access to control actions on the part of parents ? wife/husband ? company ? state" ^{[38, p. 283]}. Thus, the Bentham-Fucoldian panopticon is complemented by a new vigilant and incorruptible controller – technical means that accompany the runner everywhere and monitor the parameters of his body even during sleep.  By no means denying the multidimensional positive significance of technical controls, nevertheless, we point out that this type of supervision represents a person biomechanically ? in the form of a set of bodily parameters measured by a number, but the problem is that numbers are simple and dead, and a person is complex and – especially in the form of a running body – egregiously alive. However, the coach's remote control of the runner through the analysis of digital data and the accompanying control at the stadium, in the arena or on the cross-country path differ significantly, since in the first case, the coach does not activate mirror neurons, which occurs when directly observing the actions of the runner and is the basis of empathy. The objectivity of digital control reduces the runner to the object, increasing the existential distance between him and the coach in its mediation by digital technologies. The body visible to the eyes and represented in digital values are ontologically different phenomena. This is how V. S. Grossman describes the heroine's experiences in "Life and Destiny": "Evgenia Nikolaevna never thought that a human back could be so expressive, piercingly convey a state of mind. People approaching the window somehow stretched their necks in a special way, and their backs, with raised shoulders, with stiffened shoulder blades, seemed to scream, cry, sob" [Grossman V.S. Life and Fate. M.: OOO Publishing House "E", 2017. pp. 1179-1180]. How can this be represented "in numbers"? And the back of a runner, exhausted by a long run in difficult weather conditions, is able to say no less about his state of mind.  Let's add that an athlete, as a rule, is not informed about the ways of interpreting digital data, which makes him even more dependent and controlled, limiting the ability to challenge coaching decisions and offer an alternative view of what should be considered the most accurate assessment of performance, generating feelings of distrust, anxiety, insecurity and thereby reducing willingness to cooperate.

3. Eugenics and neo-eugenics. In the fantasy novel by the Danish athlete, journalist and writer Knud Lundberg (1920-2002)"Olympic Hope: the story that happened at the 1996 Olympic Games" [Lundberg K. The Olympic Hope: a story from the Olympic Games, 1996. S. Paul, 1958], published in Danish in 1955 and in English in 1958, describes, in particular, the birth of the finalist of the Olympic 800 m race Friedrich Haseneger.  This event occurred as a result of the implementation of a eugenic project implemented by the fictional K. Lundberg totalitarian state existing in Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, within the framework of what M. Foucault called biopolitics. The essence of the project is that the seed of Hubert Hazeneger, the best runner in Germany and a two–time winner of the Olympic Games, was fertilized by 1000 of the most successful German women runners at 400 and 800 meters. Children born from this procedure (including Friedrich Haseneger) at the age of eight months, after completion of breastfeeding, were removed from their mothers, their physical condition was checked and boys and girls corresponding to certain parameters were separately prepared for a sports career in special institutions and in conditions of fierce competition with daily competitions and ruthless rejection of losers.

Today, after the complete decoding of the human genome, they talk about neoevgenics, which allows scientists to make significant progress in explaining the genotypic conditioning of the body's characteristics most suitable for a particular sport, as well as to carry out a genetic analysis of such a predisposition in a particular person. A state interested in Olympic champions (a corporation, a rich family, etc.) may well follow in the footsteps of neo-fascist Germany invented by Knud Lundberg and develop practices of editing the human genome at the embryonic stage, thereby providing "specialized" children, for example, for high-performance running sports. If this kind of anthropotechnics is successful, generalized to biopolitics, "natural" people, with all their efforts, will not find a place at Olympic competitions. In this regard, the example of Caster Semenya, a middle—distance runner from South Africa, who became an Olympic champion in the 800 meters in 2012 and 2016, is indicative. She has not undergone genome editing, but by nature her level of male hormones is three times higher than that of the average woman, in fact she is a hermaphrodite. This gene mutation provided her with an advantage in women's races, which became the reason for litigation in the Court of Arbitration for Sport and, since Caster Semenya is not deprived of her Olympic awards (since her guilt in this transformation has not been proven), determined one of the directions of genetic work on creating the body of a runner athlete. 

4. Cyborgization of athletes. M. Foucault said that a person is a product of the discourse of humanism, more broadly, every subject is constructed, accepts identities and functions within the framework of certain discourses. If you believe F. Nietzsche, then the religious discourse of the deity is dead; if you believe M. Foucault, then the secular discourse of humanism is dead. The emerging discourse of posthumanism forms appropriate bodies: during the preparation of this article, the media reported that Elon Musk announced the successful implantation of a neurochip into the human brain, which will allow the newly minted cyborg to control gadgets literally with an effort of thought. This kind of modernization of a person, putting him in a kind of intermediate position – no longer a "purely" person, but not yet a "machine" – on the one hand, marginalize the subject, but, on the other hand, expand his freedom, are an example of the Fucoldian "technologies of the self", manifested in the inter–discursive nomadism of the subject. Oscar Pistorius, a sprinter from South Africa, is a vivid herald of the posthuman modification of running bodies. Born without fibulae in both legs, he was amputated at 11 months of age and subsequently moved only on prostheses. Being a multiple Paralympic champion in the 100, 200 and 400 m running and feeling much more potential in himself than the "sport for the disabled" allows, he began competing with "ordinary" runners and achieved outstanding results by completing the qualification standards for healthy people for the World Championships (2011) and Olympic Games on prostheses the games (2012), where he reached the semi-final stage of the competition.  On July 19, 2011, O. Pistorius showed a time of 45.07 in the 400 m distance in Lignano (Italy); for comparison, the Russian champion in the 400 m among healthy people in 2023 finished with a score of 45.41. In fact, O. Pistorius represented himself as a cyborg in the broadest sense of the word, since he moved on high?tech ultralight carbon fiber prostheses at a cost of more than $30,000, let's add a cyborg who desperately resists bio–power, since sports functionaries spent a lot of effort to break his protest against the accepted categorization of bodies, scientifically (and for modern authorities this is the main way to implement anatomical politics) justify the advantages that prostheses give him in running, and return him to the group "athletes with disabilities." The case of O. Pistorius forces us to raise questions in a new way about the classification of subjects depending on their physicality, criteria and freedom of choice of identities, the coexistence of "ordinary" and "modified" bodies and the boundaries of our biological species.   

 5. Doping as a component of anatomical and biopolitics. For all modern states, the victories of their athletes at international competitions are an important element of strengthening the image and increasing the prestige of the country. In this regard, it is clear why the use of doping becomes an element not only of anatomical (power control over individual organs of the body or subjects), but also of biopolitics (the same applies to large social groups). This is how A. Makarychev and S. Medvedev describe this situation: "Sport, apparently, is one of those areas in which anatomical politics and biopolitics merge to develop and form strategies and relations of sovereign power. Sports life is an area of radical anatomical politics, in which all the physical characteristics of protruding human bodies are absolutely necessary for its realization: weight, height, age, gender, muscular endurance, emotional uplift, and so on. These are the individual bodies of athletes who train, exercise, compete and win or lose. At the same time, bio-power in the field of sports manifests itself as a productive force for creating affective communities of fans who celebrate as collective biopolitical subjects and whose emotional investments are crucial for the formation of national identity" ^{[27, p. 4]}.

So, in the already mentioned fantasy novel by Knud Lundberg, the story of two participants in the final 800 m race from the USSR, Konev and Vlasov (they are nameless in the novel), who, having barely learned to walk, took part in children's races, and then, having won all regional competitions, went with their parents to Moscow for the USSR championship in running eighty meters among four-year-olds. The children who won prizes were removed from their families (parents were awarded a bronze cross (that's how it is in the text – S.K.), an eight-cylinder luxury car and were provided with lifelong state support with the right to attend competitions with the participation of their children as compensation). After being removed from their families, Konev and Vlasov studied and trained in a special sports camp without any connection with the outside world. Experiments were conducted on children in such training centers, in particular, some runners had their arms amputated just above the elbow, but this practice was considered unsuccessful, as it disrupted the balance of the body and the rhythm of running. Then the runners began to tie their hands and hinder their development, which is why Konev and Vlasov had very powerful legs, a huge chest, but dystrophic forelimbs. The author of the novel mentions that the preparation of each of them cost the Soviet Union 15 million Danish crowns, and the title of Hero of the Soviet Union was promised for winning the Olympics. 

As can be seen from this literary text, in totalitarian societies, doping programs are initiated, implemented and supported by the state, turning "... the bodies of individual athletes into medical and pharmaceutical machines, eliminating their innate characteristics and, in some cases, even their gender (as happened with the East German shot putter Heidi/Andreas Krieger, who turned from a woman into a man due to the widespread use of steroids and hormones)" ^{[27, p. 3]}. Thus, the athlete's body became a state resource, which was modified and used to achieve ideological and symbolic goals.

Returning from fiction to modern realities, we note that the most famous examples of the use of doping by runners include the cases of disqualified Olympic champions Ben Johnson (USA) (100 m running), Marion Jones (USA) (100 m, 200 m, 4x400 m relay), Yulia Zaripova (RF) (3000 m s hurdles), Asly Alptekin (Turkey) (1500 m), Rashida Ramzi (Bahrain) (1500 m). In accordance with M. Foucault's idea of the derivation of all aspects of the social from the dominant discourse (in the case of our modernity, "posthuman"), in early February 2024, PayPal billionaire co?founder Peter Thiel announced that he would finance the "Olympics on Steroids" ? Enhanced Games. These competitions are scheduled to be held in 2025, and all participating athletes can take any substances to improve their results. This event, as its organizers point out, is aimed at studying the impact of doping on expanding the boundaries of human capabilities.

6. Authoritarian coaching practices. According to M. Foucault, coaching practices relate to anatomical politics and aim to make running bodies obedient (disciplined) in order to ensure the development of their maximum performance as athletes through the introduction of knowledge and transformations chosen by the coach through exercises in a specially organized environment according to time, spatial and other parameters. It should be remembered that any (and not just coaching) authority always expands its reach in ways that naturally promote a culture of sameness and compliance, rather than uniqueness and resistance.  However, the more obedient an athlete is, the less initiative he is and the more dependent on the coach. This leads to the fact that in an unpredictable (as opposed to a pre-planned training) competitive situation, the runner is lost, because he is not accustomed to thinking and acting independently. In this regard, the task of finding such training methods is urgent, which would involve reducing the limitations of disciplinary techniques used to train runners in order to liberate the will of the athlete and make him more proactive. So, to develop a sense of time, athletes can run segments without using a stopwatch, then checking their speed sensations with the trainer's timer readings. The spatial arrangement can be problematic (and thus mastered in other ways) by changing the places of training and running surface, running at non-standard distances or only until a certain well-being is achieved, as well as by varying the order of starting running as part of a group. Runners who want to experience a feeling of maximum tension and understand how to act in these conditions should be able to periodically introduce themselves to this state in their chosen ways due to the uniqueness of their personal limits. Due to the specifics of athletes' recovery, training planning also needs to be discussed with them. It can be assumed that if some running exercises have a lesser physiological effect compared to traditional disciplinary practices, but deepen the athlete's understanding of the specifics of his body and "psychological self", then these exercises have a positive significance as a result. The main meaning of these transformations of the training process is to move away from the dominance of purely physiological knowledge, focused on the interpretation of the runner as a biomechanical device, and disciplinary methods based on this, turning the training process into a space of coercion and total control, dangerous for the physical and mental health of the athlete. In an interview entitled "The ethics of self-care as a practice of freedom," M. Foucault says: "I do not see where the evil is in the practice of someone who <...> knows more than another, tells him what he should do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, informs him of methods; the problem is rather The point is to find out how to avoid the effects of domination in these practices ? where power cannot but play and where it is not bad in itself ? <...>. I believe that it is necessary to put this problem in terms of the rules of law, rational management techniques and ethos, the practice of self and freedom" ^{[32, p. 267]}.

Conclusion

Many of the provisions of M. Foucault's theoretical legacy have heuristic significance for the philosophy of sports, since they provide effective tools for analyzing social and cultural factors (as well as their connections with power and ideology) that affect sports activities and its actors. It is obvious that athletes find themselves in a public space, the components of which are various agents, techniques and practices of power, which include programs for the development of national sports, plans for physical culture and sports achievements, sports officials, coaches, media, budgets, sports medicine, ethical standards, competitions, and most importantly - an infinite number of relationships (in our case the most important of which is the interaction of the coach and the athlete), through which the vibes of power penetrate into sports bodies, sometimes harshly, but more often subtly subordinating them to their will. In the modern world, sport has become a sphere of institutionalized indoctrination, directing moving bodies to an epistemically (power/knowledge) deterministic lifestyle. In this regard, it is important for athletes to understand that each of them must not only learn to be an "obedient body", but also have the opportunity and desire, within the framework of discursively conditioned sports training, to be an active subject in shaping himself. This tension between the athlete's aspirations for maximum self-realization, risk, record, sports creativity and other phenomena of freedom and authority, discipline, hierarchy of the environment where these aspirations can be effectively implemented and recognized, makes it increasingly necessary to turn to philosophical concepts that problematized such situations, in particular to the ideas of Michel Foucault.