Gemeinsinn in Praktiken des olympischen Spitzensports

Communal sense (lat. sensus communis) is an essential prerequisite for the realization of (performance) justice and is articulated as fairness in elite olympic sports. In this paper, we show how communal sense provides implicit orientation in elite sport practices, using empirical cases from the fields of swimming and soccer. This latent meaning is reconstructed typifyingly using the documentary method in narrative interview data. For this purpose, a heuristic of communal sense is used, which combines social and political moments and frames the practical connectedness of the social actors in four dimensions (“being an athlete”, “training together”, “competing against each other”, “sport-political activities”). As a result of a comparative case analysis, four types of communal sense emerge (“success”, “community”, “arbitrariness”, “justice”), which make differences in the realization of performance justice understandable beyond the boundaries of different sport types and provide an approach to enhance the discussion about the normativity of modern sports.