"Olympic Hope": Fucoldian interpretations

Kannykin Stanislav Vladimirovich ORCID: 0000-0002-3250-4276 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor; Department of Humanities; Starooskolsky Technological Institute named after A.A. Ugarov (branch) of NUST MISIS 309503, Russia, Belgorod region, Stary Oskol, Nikitsky, 6 stvk2007@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

In modern "haptic" ^[1] (from the Greek word haptikos ‒ tactile, tactile) culture and postmodern humanitarianism exploring it, overcoming logocentrism that deprives a person of integrity, the body becomes the subject of multidimensional research and the place of intersection of a wide variety of discourses: sports (philosophy of sports), medical (bioethics), political (biopolitics), psychological (psychoanalysis), philosophical (phenomenology), sociological (sociology of the body), pedagogical (physical education), etc. ^{[2, 3]}. One of the manifestations of this "telocentricity" is the popularity of sports competitions and the flourishing of the fitness industry. Currently, professional sports, demonstrating virtuoso body control in a competitive environment, is a favorite sight for millions and, because of this, a prestigious social elevator, and amateur sports make you feel like a hero (for example, in the case of completing a marathon distance), not afraid to leave your comfort zone and able to overcome your boundaries.

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 ^[4], and this is primarily a running body, since many sports disciplines are based on this type of locomotion. In addition, stayer running is the most popular modern type of amateur sport. Here is how B. Glanville writes about the importance of running: "You run for the sake of millions of people who believe in you, for the sake of children who want to be like you, for the sake of adults who regret that they were not like you in their youth. The athlete is significant not only in himself, but also what he represents is important; today his role is more important than ever ‒ in the age of automation and mechanization, when the body is forgotten and neglected" [Glanville B. The Olympian. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. P. 95].

The antiquity, popularity and multidimensional use of running practices, of course, are reflected in fiction. As John Bale writes, "recent years have witnessed a literary turn in sports research, when scientists consider, on the one hand, literary, poetic and dramatic ways of presenting their research and, on the other hand, <...> explore the content of extant literature as a means of interpreting the world of sports and its representations. Such modern research presupposes a careful reading of literary texts, a search for significance in what is hidden between the lines" ^{[5, p. 190]}. The most authoritative and complete scientific publication devoted to the study of running in world literature is the monograph of the New Zealand world-class runner and famous literary critic Roger Robins (born in 1939) ^[6], which traces the description of running activities from the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad to the works of fiction of the late twentieth century. R. Robins He studies the depiction of running and the use of running metaphors in the poems of Pindar and Ovid, the epistles of St. Paul the Apostle, the works of Dante, Shakespeare, J. Milton, R. L. Stevenson, T. Hardy, G. W. Longfellow, J. Joyce, D. Lawrence, W. Collins, C. S. Lewis, R. Kipling, C. Sorley, D. Kerouac, J. Sheehan, E. Leonard, K. Lundberg, A. Sillitoe, B. Glanville and many other authors. "... marathon runner and scientist Roger Robinson explores the sanctity, sexuality, freedom and engagement in life that running embodies in literature. Runners lead, lag behind, and sometimes get tired, all the time facing the harsh realities of life" ^{[7, p. 24]}. Also noteworthy is the work of Alexis Tady ^[8], which explicates the construction of a runner as a rebel and a hero defending the value of freedom by literary means, using the example of the character of Alan Sillitoe's story "Loneliness of a long-distance runner" by a difficult teenager Smith, who is in a colony for juvenile delinquents, passionate about stayer running and using it to protest against the injustice and falsity of the social environment surrounding him. A. Teidi's attention is also attracted by the hero of Jean Eshnoz's novel "Running" ‒ the world–famous Czech athlete Emil Zatopek - the only runner in the world who won gold medals at 5,000 m, 10,000 m and marathon at the same Olympics (1952, Helsinki). In addition to his outstanding sporting achievements, E. Zatopek is known for his civic position in opposition to the authorities of Soviet Czechoslovakia, associated with the support of Alexander Dubcek, which, after the defeat of the Prague Spring, plunged him into long-term disgrace and put an end to a prosperous life. From the works of modern Russian scientists, we note the dissertation research of S. S. Rykov [Rykov S. S. Amateur marathon running: socio-cultural meanings and practices of representation in the space of modern culture: dissertation... candidate of Cultural Studies. Chelyabinsk, 2023], one of the sections of which is devoted to the types of description of marathon running in modern Russian and foreign fiction. Sports running attracts writers primarily for its humanistic potential, which, in particular, B. Glanville writes about.: "The possibilities of the body are limitless if it is subordinated to a strong spirit. Twenty years ago, it was believed that you couldn't run a mile in four minutes. I told: we'll wait until they run it for three forty, and they laughed at me. So what? Now not only athletes, but also schoolchildren run a mile in four minutes. <...> The main thing is awareness of the goal. Once you realize that it is possible to achieve the goal, it will be achieved. That's what sports are for, records are needed. They show the possibilities of a person, and these possibilities are endless. The incredible is realized, and then realized" [Glanville B. The Olympian. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. P. 16].

An analysis of these sources leads us to understand that the basis of a number of works of fiction dedicated to athlete runners is the conflict between the feeling of freedom and joy generated by running ("Running made me free. It saved me from worrying about the opinions of others, from rules and regulations imposed from the outside" [Sheehan G. Running & being: the total experience. N.Y.: Rodale Books, 2013. p. 33]; "(while running – S.K.) kindness, truth and beauty suddenly take over me. I am surprised with joy, filled with delight, and I have no choice but to rejoice with tears in my eyes" [Sheehan G. Running & being: the total experience. N.Y.: Rodale Books, 2013. pp. 334-335]; "Sometimes it seems to me that I have never been so free as in these couple of hours when I run out of the gate onto the path and turn off at a thick oak with bare branches at the end of the path" [Sillitou A. Loneliness of a runner on long distances. Moscow : AST Publishing House, 2016. p. 10] and fierce competition, as well as the authoritarian regulation of the professional sports environment, awakening the worst human qualities: "If I were asked to describe the world of athletics in one word, I would probably choose the word "hate." I say this looking back from today. There is a constant war between the authorities and the athletes, and the coaches in the middle, like lightning rods or agents provocateurs. I remember Ron Wayne, a fan of giving rants, once said: "The world of athletics is one big family." And I thought, "Yes, that's right, one big, unhappy family in which parents fight with children all the time." After all, athletes ‒ they are spoiled, always arguing children, and the bosses resemble Victorian-era parents. That's how it was, most likely, it will be" [Glanville B. The Olympian. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. P. 84]. 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, the media, budgets, sports medicine, ethical standards, competitions, and most importantly, an infinite number of relationships (for example, the interaction of a coach and an athlete), through which the vibes of power penetrate into sports bodies, sometimes harshly, but more often subtly subordinating them to their will. This tension between an 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 (1926-1984) – French historian, cultural critic and philosopher.

M. Foucault as a theorist of the disciplinary body

The analysis of M. Foucault's ideological heritage, as well as the receptions of his works, allows us to conclude that considering the body in the context of not only anthropological, but also political and power relations has serious grounds related to the fact that social order is largely ensured by control over the appearance and ways of satisfying the needs of bodies; many bodily actions and effects They create a special language that structures social actions; bodies symbolize societies, and bodily identifications and manipulations support fundamental social relationships that are important for the structure of power: gender, health, age, race, sexual orientation. Power subordinates the body in various ways ‒ both repressive (death penalty, imprisonment, punitive psychiatry) and recessive: generating the desires it needs and rewarding for their satisfaction. The sports environment as a special form of organization of social space is also permeated with currents of power regulation of athletes who carry out competitive gaming activities in it according to certain rules that maximize the chances of participants and make the outcome of the competition uncertain in advance and therefore dramatic. This arouses great public interest and has multiple disciplining influences on both the athletes themselves and the audience, which naturally leads to the conclusion: "... the importance of sport in relation to the structure of power lies in the fact that it is uniquely endowed with the ability to use the body in such a way as to represent and reproduce social relations in a preferred way" ^{[9, p. 142]}. The results of M. Foucault's research on the relationship between power, knowledge and the body are especially significant for the philosophy of sports. Let us briefly describe the basic concepts used by the French philosopher to analyze social reality.

1. Bio-power as a unity of anatomical and biopolitics. Their development, according to M. Foucault, took place since the XVII century and is expressed in two poles: "One of these poles ‒ the one that seems to have formed first ‒ was centered around a body understood as a machine, <...> ‒ the whole anatomical politics of the human body. Second <...> centered around the body-the genus, around the body, which is permeated with the mechanics of life and serves as a support for biological processes: reproduction, fertility and mortality, health, life expectancy, longevity <...> ‒ the real biopolitics of population. The disciplines of the body and the ways of regulating the population form the two poles around which the organization of power over life has developed" ^{[10, pp. 242-243]}. It is important to emphasize that M. Foucault takes power beyond the state and the ruling class, with which it was previously steadily associated. Power forms one with knowledge and circulates in the interactions of individuals. Modern power does not so much frighten and compel, as it seduces and motivates, shaping bodies in such a way that they are as effective and reliable as possible for a long time. This "positive" mode of power is desirable for a person, because the more he has absorbed the knowledge produced by the discourses of power and transformed under their influence, increasing his efficiency, the more he receives rewards and domination over other bodies. In this regard, it is clear why many athletes do not leave the field of sports after finishing their careers, becoming coaches or sports administrators: they have adapted to almost complete subordination in the rather closed world of training bases, realized the advantages of strict discipline and rewards for obedience, they are comfortable in this environment where almost all decisions are made by someone instead of them, and are anxious at the thought of having to independently make existentially significant choices in the complete uncertainty of life outside of big sports.

2. Disciplinary practices. "Discipline" is the name of the third section of the book "To supervise and punish. The Birth of prison" ^[11], where M. Foucault writes: "The methods that make possible the most detailed control over the actions of the body, ensure the constant subordination of its forces and impose on them a relationship of obedience ‒ usefulness, can be called "disciplines". There have long been numerous disciplinary methods ‒ in monasteries, armies and craft workshops. But in the XVII ‒ XVIII centuries, disciplines became general formulas of domination. They differ from slavery in that they are not based on the attitude of appropriation of bodies, and even have some grace, since they can achieve at least equal usefulness without bothering themselves with the aforementioned expensive and violent attitude" ^{[11, p. 200]}. Inheriting the methods of pastoral authority, disciplines do not suppress "obedient bodies", but "normalize" them in accordance with certain standards, acting totally, but at the same time often covertly, silently. The forms of disciplinary practices applied to sports are (using M. Foucault's terminology): training plans; various exercises; organization of training time and space; "normalizing judgments" as coaching assessments; "recognition" (heart-to-heart conversations between the coach and athletes, consolation or motivation); "exam" (competitions and testing). Physical education is a pronounced disciplinary practice that brings the body in line with the regulatory requirements of a particular sport, while the sports themselves are often called "disciplines".

3. Supervision and panopticism. M. Foucault describes two concepts of body control: supervision and panopticism. Supervision was inherent in feudal societies and was expressed in external control: "Continuous inspection. Vigilant surveillance everywhere <…>. There were observation posts at all city gates, sentries at the corner of every street" ^{[11, p. 286]} and public executions, which were supposed to keep the population in fear. Modern societies practice disciplinary authority, which is based on internal control, that is, each individual becomes a supervisor for himself. M. Foucault's figurative expression of this is the "panopticon" of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), an English philosopher who is considered the founder of modern utilitarianism. D. Bentham developed a project for a circular prison building arranged in such a way that prisoners do not see the jailers and do not know for sure whether the convicts are being monitored at the moment. At the same time, the prison guards themselves do not know exactly when they are controlled by the prison management. This uncertainty forces both the former and the latter to think about the permanence of invisible control and thereby bring their behavior in line with the norms. The organization of such self-control is achieved by the special location of the buildings in the prison. And since "panopticism, according to Bentham, is a general political formula characterizing the type of government ^{[12, p. 91]}, M. Foucault finds its manifestations everywhere: in hospitals, in the army, and in schools, where people are distributed by the administration in a special way so that they constantly feel the oppression of covert supervision and themselves properly they regulated their behavior. It should be noted that the control of runners through smart watches, which constantly transmit data to the trainer's computer, as well as the abundance of mirrors in fitness clubs also fall under the logic of panopticism: everything that one person does can be noticed and appreciated by many others.

4. Technologies of selfhood and subjectivation. It is obvious that the personality as a socially embodied body is not an exclusively passive perceiver of power influences. M. Foucault was also interested in the problems of personal transformations determined by the personality itself in the field of types of social interaction set by the government. It can be said that this was the main theme of his later work related to the creation of the "History of Sexuality". Denying a priori, transcendental subjectivity, he considers the subject to be exclusively a concrete historical formation: "... I am interested in just historical folding <...> various forms of the subject in their relationship with the games of truth" ^{[13, p. 255]}. M. Foucault believes that three modes of objectification transform a person from a subject: dominant discourses, for example science; "dividing practices" (for example, gifted/untalented, the so-called "identifying individualization") and "self-objectification" ("techniques of self", "techniques of life", by which subjects make an original work out of their lives). At the same time, the first two modes relate to external factors, and the third forms an internal factor. Its basis is self-knowledge, "self-care" and "self-enjoyment". Subjectivation is carried out in social space as an interweaving of discourses, in relation to each of them a person becomes a certain subject, which is confirmed by others ‒ both individuals and institutions. Thus, "... Foucault reveals the complex interweaving of individual human efforts with the pressure of the social environment. He shows on a large material that the formation of subjectivity is not a reflexive-cognitive process, but is fundamentally practical, determined not so much by the power of the individual's own mind as by the social practice in which he is included" ^{[14, pp. 65-66]}. The technologies of the self are aimed at making the dominance of power minimal, cultivating self-esteem and ethically loaded ways of existence, "... transforming oneself in order to achieve a state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality" ^{[15, p. 100]}. Many conflicts between athletes and authoritarian coaches are caused by the desire of athletes for greater freedom within the framework of sports discipline, which they consider as an important condition for maximum self-realization.

Next, let's look through the prism of Foucault's ideas at the little-known novel in Russia and not translated into Russian (all translations in the text of this article are made by its author) by the Danish athlete, doctor, politician and sports journalist Knud Lundberg (1920-2002) "Det Olympiske Håb", published in Danish in 1955 and in English in 1958 the year under the title "The Olympic Hope: a story from the Olympic Games, 1996" ("Olympic Hope: the story that happened at the 1996 Olympic Games"). This text refers to the works of a rare genre ‒ sports science fiction, describing the fictional K. Lundberg final race in the men's 800 meters at the 1996 Olympic Games in Hamburg and the life path of the participants in this competition. The race lasted 86 seconds and took place on a cinder track in the presence of 800 thousand spectators, who were located on the three-story stands of the stadium and in its aisles, since the stadium was designed for 750 thousand seats. Six runners came together in the final: nameless Konev and Vlasov from the USSR (partial individualization of runners only by last names, apparently, expresses the totalitarian nature of Soviet society and its collectivity); two athletes from the United States ‒ representatives of the black race Jim Stocker and Ted Jackson; German Friedrich Hazeneger and the Dane Erling (in Scandinavian countries, this onym can be both a first name and a surname, translated from Old Norse ‒ "descendant of the leader (jarl)"). The events of this race are described by an 84-year-old narrator, writing down his memories of the Olympic final 800 m race in 2004.

National options for implementing bioweapons

First of all, it should be noted that high-performance sports in 1996 had great political importance, since it became the largest item of the national budget after military expenditures in all totalitarian states, and in democratic societies the centers of sports training were universities where sports improvement was carried out on an advanced scientific basis, which also involved significant expenses. At the same time, the Olympic Games had the greatest prestige, a year before which the participating countries tried their best to hide the results of their athletes, and their rivals tried to do everything possible to find out these results. For example, in the USSR, at the Dynamo stadium, where the national championship was held, a huge electromagnet was installed that distorted the stopwatch readings, so representatives of competing states had to measure the time of Soviet hourglass runners.

How was the training of runners for top-level sports carried out in different countries? Knud Lundberg models four types of sports bio-power as a synthesis of anatomical and biopolitics: "Sports life is an area of radical anatomical politics in which all the physical characteristics of protruding human bodies are absolutely necessary for its implementation: 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" ^{[16, p. 4]}.

A. The German version. Representing Germany, Friedrich Hazeneger is described in the novel as the highest product of German athletics, he is completely bald (as is fashionable in the main party of Germany, where everyone imitates the shaven-headed leader of the state von Preuss), with the burning eyes of a fanatic and always restless chewing muscles. Friedrich Hazeneger is the result of a German eugenic project, the essence of which is that the seed of his father Hubert Hazeneger, the best runner in Germany and a two–time winner of the Olympic Games, was artificially ("everyone knew that the famous Hubert was not interested in women" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 35]) fertilized 1000 of the most successful German women-runners for 400 and 800 meters. Children born from this procedure 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 closed institutions. Friedrich Hazeneger and his brothers, for example, were educated at a sports school located in an old castle in the Black Forest. Friedrich Hazeneger defeated all his half-brothers in a huge number of qualifying competitions and was honored to represent Germany at the Olympics.

The discourse of the German version of bio-power presented in the novel refers to the ideological legacy of the German teacher and public figure Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778-1852), who justified pan-Germanism, the exclusivity of the German people and the need to develop their spirit and body on the basis of physical improvement with the help of projectile gymnastics, which he first developed. "The national socialist state partially grew out of the cult of athletic male bodies, which based all its openly representative scenarios on the direct feeling of a sports body, unencumbered by reflection, historical feeling, sympathy and longing" ^{[17, p. 206]}. Ideological work was constantly carried out with children, they were taught that the main drawback of an athlete was softness, and the greatest happiness was to win honor and glory for the motherland by winning an Olympic gold medal.

We also note the vivid manifestations of social Darwinism, since for many years children have been training in conditions of intense competition. "Every day and every hour during the day, they fought over who would run the fastest 800 meters. They fought for points every hour of the day. The rating meant everything. Those who were lower in rank could be forced to do anything. They had to obey blindly. It was a matter of being on top. Always on top. In tests for reaction at the start, for endurance, for insensitivity to pain and in all other tests that gave points and determined the rating. "He's ranked above me" or "He's ranked below me." That was all. Everything that meant anything in the old castle in the Black Forest. The elite of masculinity, endurance and courage were brought up there" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 30].

B. The Soviet version. The unnamed Konev and Vlasov were from different regions of the USSR: Konev was from Kiev, Vlasov from Batumi, but in the novel they are equally called "Russians". As soon as they learned to walk, they took part in children's races, and then, having won all regional competitions, they went with their parents to Moscow for the USSR championship in the eighty-meter run among four-year-olds. The Dynamo Stadium in Moscow, like the stadium in Hamburg, held 750,000 people and was filled to capacity at such prestigious competitions. In the final race of the best children of the USSR, Konev defeated Vlasov, in response, the latter in impotent rage began to beat Konev until they were separated by the judges. The kids who won prizes were withdrawn 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 lifelong state support with the right to attend competitions with the participation of their children as compensation). The author of the novel mentions that the preparation of each of them cost the Soviet Union 15 million Danish kroner, and the title of Hero of the Soviet Union was promised for the victory.

If the German version of the bio–power went back to the glorious past of the German tribes and was based on the archaic, then in the Soviet Union they were inspired by the construction of an advanced, hitherto unprecedented ‒ communist - type of society and a corresponding "new" person who could make any fairy tale (including a seemingly insurmountable record) come true. In the USSR, mass running was promoted by the state through the TRP complex, the badge of which depicted a runner overcoming the finish line, and sports, record–breaking running - by numerous sports schools of the Olympic reserve, which were obliged to fulfill state plans for the training of high-class athletes. "So, if the National Socialists sought to create a new "genetically pure" type of person, thinking in terms of the cult of power, national-racial differentiation and intolerance, then for the Communists the main task was to forge a "new man" based on the ideals of peace, equality and brotherhood of all people and nations" [Pashchenko L. V. Totalitarianism: Russia - Germany in the XX century : comparative historical and philosophical analysis : abstract of the dissertation of the Candidate of Philosophical Sciences. Murmansk, 2010. p. 12].

B. The American version. In the USA, the multi-billionaire Hendersen organized a fund that funded the "breeding" of tall people of the black race who would become outstanding basketball players or high jumpers glorifying America. The Foundation was financially interested in tall people (who are at least sixteen inches taller than normal) to create a family with partners of the same height, and took the children born in this marriage under its care, organizing all conditions for their sports development in a special educational institution, which in the text of K. Lundberg is called "Black University", where there were all levels of education. The pets of this foundation were both American participants of the final race, but their physical conditions were very different: Jim Stocker was the smallest in this six, and Ted Jackson was the largest and tallest. The fact is that Stoker's mother, Margaret, being seven feet tall (2 m 13 cm), was married to the best basketball player in America (and therefore the world) Harry Stoker, but when he was away at competitions, cheated on him with a short black saxophonist virtuoso in a bar. From this fleeting relationship, kept secret from her husband, Jim was born. At the same time, Margaret could not conceive a child from Harry, because very tall people, as a rule, are weakly fertile. Little Jim, who discovered his phenomenal ability to speed endurance in early childhood, was admitted to Hendersen University at the age of six, where his running potential was developed by the best coaches, doctors and psychologists, allowing him to live at home until the age of 14. The only thing that distracted Jim from training was an incomprehensible craving for music. But Margaret, who was extremely uncomfortable with the memories of adultery with a saxophonist, simply removed all the radios and gramophones from the house and censored the television programs that the boy watched.

As for Ted Jackson, having been born from both tall parents, he inherited their height and bodily conditions to the fullest, being at the time of the Olympic final race a student of the "Black University", having a height of 2.30 cm and a weight of 120 kg. But it is important to note that these outstanding bodily parameters were provided not only by heredity, but also by hormonal therapy. The fact is that often the children of giants had extremely long, thin limbs and a short rounded body, prone to fullness. As children, they were quite pleased with themselves, but in adulthood they were confused by their strange appearance and the fact that almost all of them were impotent. Doctors from the Hendersen Foundation convinced the parents Ted (not the least of which was the $100,000 reward) in the need for hormonal experiments on their child, which began to be carried out with the boy when he reached the age of three. As a result of hormone therapy (neutralization of sex hormones, increasing the effectiveness of growth hormones), Ted's body became unusually harmonious, but his sexual and intellectual development stopped after the age of 12: he was completely uninterested in girls, and his IQ level remained forever within 85 units. In the laboratories of the university, such a result was considered acceptable for the beginning of experiments, since Ted Jackson was serenely happy, athletically built, easily suggestible and nothing distracted him from sports. However, due to a lack of intelligence, he could not be a full-fledged member of a basketball or football team. The reason for this was his inability to interact with other players in complex group combinations, besides, he succumbed to any opponent's feint, even the same one with multiple repetitions, so Ted specialized in "artless" running for 800 meters. At the same time, it is important to note that due to mental immaturity, he was not able to change his running tactics at a distance. Ted Jackson had only one option: to run at a constant maximum speed for himself from start to finish.

The American version of bio-power, as you can see, is also associated with eugenics. It is noteworthy that Jim Stocker and Ted Jackson are African–Americans, and the center for sports Eugenics is called a "Black University". In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States was a pronounced racist state, in some states of which joint competitions of white and black athletes were banned, and later many teams had unofficial quotas for black players. Eugenic "corrections" (for example, mass sterilization) and experiments were primarily subjected to "superfluous", "unsuitable" people, most of whom represent the colored population. Ted Jackson's parents actually bought a child for hormonal experiments, which could well have ended in his death, and not just dementia. The very fact that the "Black University" puts sports first for African Americans corresponds to the racist narrative about the low fitness of the non-white population for intellectual activity.

G. Danish version: unlike all the other finalists, Erling's training did not cost the state or any institutions or sponsors a single penny, since in Denmark they adhered to the old-fashioned opinion that athletes are rewarded with the joy of training and competitions themselves. Erling was introduced to the sport and coached by his grandfather, a multiple Danish champion and bronze medalist at the 1974 European Javelin Championship. It is important to note that grandfather was an amateur who trained on his own, throwing a spear in the heather fields in between farm chores, and in the rural work itself he found actions that served as exercises for him, for example, loading turnips into a cart, throwing it over his shoulder like a spear. If the little Erling ran all the way from home to his grandfather's farm, he received a candy from him; when his grandson set a record for this distance, he was rewarded with a bar of milk chocolate. Convinced of his talent, his grandfather began to study the advanced Soviet method of training runners and helped his 12-year-old grandson and his older sister build a four-hundred-meter gravel track on the wasteland next to the house, on which the teenager Erling soon began to show national-level results. To train even more, he stopped riding a children's motorcycle to school, running back and forth for eight kilometers and accelerating 800 m three times at full speed in each direction. When Erling turned 15, he set a Danish record for this distance at official competitions and made the front pages of newspapers, as well as television reports. After that, sales of children's motorcycles in Denmark declined sharply... Knud Lundberg repeatedly emphasizes that Erling ran only for pleasure, fame and money did not interest him.

The specifics of the Danish version of bio‒power can be understood based on Erling's goal: "Not being the last was the best thing he hoped to achieve in this company" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 125]. Erling is the only one of the runners who does not dream of winning, his main desire is to show himself worthily in the final, which corresponds to the Olympic principle "the main thing is not victory, but participation." This is a manifestation of the unwritten social code of modesty Janteloven ("Jant's Law"), shared by many conservative Swedes, Danes, Finns, Norwegians and Icelanders, which, generalizing the social attitudes of the Scandinavian peoples, operated in the fictional Norwegian writer Axel Sandemus (1899-1965) small town of Jant, where everyone is in plain sight of each other. The description of the rules of life adopted there is presented in the novel "The Fugitive Crosses his Trail", published in 1933, which was not translated into Russian. The "Law of Jante" includes ten rules: among which "do not think that you are special", "do not brag that you are better than us", "do not think that you can do something well", etc. Danish Queen Margrethe II declared: "We are very proud of our modesty. This is our inverted megalomania. It is very subtle" ^{[18, p. 454]}. The derivatives of the "Jante Law" are collectivism, modesty, justice, trust in people, hard work, thrift and asceticism – the distinctive features of the Scandinavians. These features are reflected in sports: "... it is said that 13‑time world champion in cross‒country skiing Petter Northug was less arrogant thanks to Yanteloven, assessed his rivals more objectively - and therefore won" [Vdovenko A. Janteloven: An ambiguous Scandinavian view of justice. URL: https://lifehacker.ru/yanteloven-zakon-yante / (date of access: 02/14/2024)].

Doping, disciplinary practices, resistance and transgression of runners

K. Lundberg considers the use of doping drugs, hormone therapy for runners to improve athletic fitness and crippling practices to be significant elements of anatomical policy as a component of bio-power. Friedrich used drug doping in the Olympic Hope Hazeneger, Jim Stocker and Ted Jackson, the latter was still subjected to hormone therapy to improve physical fitness, and representatives of the USSR Konev and Vlasov faced crippling practices. At the same time, as the author of the novel believes, in 1996, the Olympic rules "... no one in their right mind took seriously anymore" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 32]; "officially, the Germans did not use doping ‒ just like others. But, of course, no one except the Olympic Committee believed in this" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 74].

Describing the doping history of Friedrich Haseneger, K. Lundberg reports that German banned drugs for runners were the best in the world, they were injected into the human body immediately before the race and reached the peak of their effects immediately after the start. These drugs had significant side effects – after taking them, the runner was on the verge of heart failure, while several athletes died at the stage of testing these secret substances. Both Americans also received an injection into the inner side of the elbow before starting the run: they were doped not into the muscles, but into the blood. "Stocker didn't know what was in the syringe, but he knew it wasn't dangerous. After the race, a person was mortally tired ‒ physiologists claimed that this could mobilize seventy-five percent of hidden reserves in the short time that the 800-meter race lasted. So it is not surprising that after that the athlete was completely exhausted. A person should not climb stairs or waste energy on anything else twenty-four hours after the race ‒ physiologists especially warned against sexual intercourse ‒ and no one was allowed to train for the next six days" ["The Olympic Hope...", pp. 74-75]. As for the crippling practices of Soviet runners, the novel narrates that after being removed from the Konev and Vlasov families, they studied and trained in a special sports camp, where experiments were carried out on children, in particular, some runners had their arms amputated just above the elbow (apparently to reduce weight), but this practice was considered unsuccessful, so how it disrupted the balance of the body and the rhythm of running. Then the runners began to tie their hands and hinder their development (i.e., gain muscle mass), which is why Konev and Vlasov had very powerful legs, a huge chest, but dystrophic forelimbs.

Next, let's turn to disciplinary practices. First, we note that all runners, except for the Dane, developed their athletic talents in specialized spaces closed from outsiders: a German in an old castle in the Black Forest, K. Lundberg writes about Russians as follows: "From the waist up they looked like prisoners of a concentration camp ‒ and in a sense it was so. They have been in a training camp without any connection with the outside world since they were four years old" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 51], Ted Jackson and Jim Stocker were isolated at the "Black University" from the age of three and fourteen, respectively. Being in these spaces assumed a strict daily routine, in particular, it is said about Jim Stoker that "his diet, sleep, workouts and leisure hours were carefully planned," and when he had a sexual need, the university found him a girl who "... as it seemed to him, found him on her own. They (the supervising staff of the university – S.K.) made sure that he lived a healthy, simple sexual life..." ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 70]. Then there are daily strenuous running exercises. For example, in a German castle, a frequent exercise for Hubert Hazeneger's children was running on an escalator, similar to a roller ribbon, which moved so fast that it was very difficult to stay on it, and those who fell off were subjected to humiliating punishments. At the same time, the runners on the tape had to look at the big screen, where their common father was running in the style that they had to adopt. From time to time, the image of the child was superimposed on the picture of Hubert Hazeneger running, so that the discrepancies of their techniques were clearly visible, which was loudly warned by the coach controlling the process. The social space in the German version assumed the constant differentiation of children by rating and daily exams described above. The listed practices, conceptualized by M. Foucault in "To supervise and punish. The birth of prison" were ways of exercising disciplinary power aimed at turning children into high–performance running machines under the supervision of scientists, psychotherapists, physiologists, massage therapists, special services employees and trainers - agents of scientific discourse (knowledge/power), on the basis of which the discipline and normalization of "running bodies" were carried out.

However, as M. Foucault wrote, power necessarily presupposes disobedience: "... 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" ^{[13, pp. 257-258]}. In the work "Subject and Power" M. Foucault distinguishes three types of such struggle with power: 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, thereby ensuring his subordination to others. What is meant here is that the government: "... classifies individuals into categories, characterizes them through their own individuality, binds them to their identity, imposes on them the law of truth that they should recognize and that others should recognize for them. This form of power transforms individuals into subjects" ^{[13, pp. 167-168]}.

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 to change or weaken its influence" ^{[19, p. 209]} (examples of "unloved entities" may be political regimes, ideologies, sports officials, doping, discrimination, etc.), and the second D. Bale understands like going beyond the boundaries of normality, which sometimes happens unintentionally.

In Olympic Hope, Konev's actions are an example of resistance. He finished in the final race behind the group of winners, and he did it on purpose. The text of the novel repeatedly emphasizes that all the experts (for example, Erling's grandfather; the narrator himself; competent spectators at the stadium) are clearly aware that Konev is the best runner of the finals, with whom no one can compare, and Konev himself, at some point carried away by the race and feeling his huge potential, just for a moment he feels longing for a real Olympic victory for him, fortunately surpassing the best runners in the world, but overcomes himself ("he fought against his own runner's soul" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 151]) and stops competing. The fact is that Konev fell in love with the best swimmer of the USSR, Sonya, whom he accidentally met after getting lost in a huge stadium. That's what she tells him during their first and only meeting: "Why are we forbidden to even look at a man? ‒ She whispered. "You're the first man I've ever touched." I don't want to let you go again. <...> How long will we tolerate when our coach takes away the "Soviet sport" from us if we don't quickly scroll through the pages with photos of men? And psychotherapists will not make me forget about you" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 24]. Male runners were also strictly forbidden from dating women. In a few minutes of their only conversation, Konev and Sonya decide to lose all competitions so that they will be expelled from the USSR national team and they can be together. At the same time, both Konev and Sonya risk their lives, since the novel mentions a certain Shcherbakov, a famous champion who suddenly also began to lose, after which he disappeared without a trace...

Transgression in the novel is represented by the images of Friedrich Haseneger and Erling. In accordance with the state ideology of striving for German primacy in everything, the German Olympians, including on the initiative of Friedrich Hazeneger, decided to commit suicide in case of loss (and this is any place except the first one). The head of the German state supported this call, seeing in it a manifestation of "an iron spirit worthy of the old school" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 33], and during the first four days of the Games in Hamburg, three German athletes used a revolver lying in the locker room of their national team. The finish line, as it seemed from the stands where the narrator is, is simultaneously touched by Hazeneger, who bet his life on victory, Erling and Stocker. As it turns out, the German did it first, but he crossed the finish line in a furious jump with his hand, and according to the rules, the winner is the one who first steps over it with his feet. Therefore, the victory was awarded to Stoker, Erling was recognized as the second, and Hazeneger turned out to be only the third. The German kept his promise, the sound of a shot could not be heard in the roar of the crowd chanting his name, and only Hazeneger's sneakers were presented for the award, on which a little later they would put a medal with the inscription "Not for the sake of victory, but for the sake of participation"... Amazed by the German's running skill, courage and loyalty to the oath, Erling shifted his sneakers from with a medal from the third step of the pedestal to his own ‒ the second, and he took the "bronze" place of Hazeneger ‒ and at that moment the applause of the stadium turned into a frenzied roar. As the narrator says, Erling won not only an Olympic medal, but with his nobility and modesty, the heart of the whole of Germany.

From criticism of sports to Olympic hope

Let us present some particular observations, problems and conclusions concerning running sports in the view of K. Lundberg. First of all, attention is drawn to the critical nature of the novel, which reveals to the reader the underside of Olympic competitions. This primarily concerns the negative transformations of the body and spirit of athletes by eugenic practices, doping and state pressure, which can be combined with the concept of bio-power. The analysis of the options for the implementation of bio-power in sports practices using the example of the Olympic Hope shows its complex nature as uniting sovereign power, disciplinary power and elements of biopolitics. This is how M. Foucault writes about this complexity: "Thus, in modern societies, from the XIX century to the present day, there is, on the one hand, legislation, discourse, a system of state law based on the principle of the sovereignty of society and the delegation by each of its sovereign will to the state; on the other hand, an extensive network of disciplinary coercion, actually providing communication within society. <...> In modern societies, power is exercised in the interaction of these heterogeneous principles ‒ state law and the diverse mechanics of discipline, through this interaction and proceeding from it" ^{[20, p. 56]}. In particular, the sovereign power is manifested in the fact that all the considered options for training top-class runners are legitimate and supported by the state, since the Olympic Games should demonstrate the greatness of the country and strengthen its image in the international arena. Disciplinary power is manifested in a system of supervision, "training" with the help of exercises, the distribution of subjects into groups, normalization and punishment, which we see when describing the training process of runners. Bio‒power, on the other hand, involves working with the masses by controlling their fertility, reproduction, health, mortality, etc. - This was manifested in the eugenic projects and racist practices described in the novel.

Next, we note the descriptions of the training process, for example, of German runners – this is, in fact, a drill, where the main incentive is the opportunity to avoid punishment and humiliation, unquestioningly following the coach's commands and giving everything in sports and competitions. But this does not only apply to Germans. Thus, Vlasov, nicknamed the "human locomotive", was frankly written off by K. Lundberg from the great Czechoslovak runner Emil Zatopek, who had the nickname "Czech locomotive" and trained in the ultra-disciplinary army environment of the socialist state. Zatopek was known for very harsh methods of running and the fact that he did not hide his torment during the competition: his face was distorted with grimaces of pain, and heavy breathing was interspersed with moans. Vlasov is practically the same biorobot – a fanatic of extreme work intensity and strict discipline, hunched, nervous, unable to relax, clearly overtrained, always envious of the extraordinarily talented and easily running Konev and painfully reacting to any manifestations of a joyful life. The following quote fits Vlasov's image perfectly: "Physical culture and sport, due to the combination of the potentials of biological and social human management, play a special role in a totalitarian system, since their main task in this case is kinesthetic programming of a person for his utilitarian and pragmatic use, the results of which are biorobotization and animalization of people, leading to their socio-cultural degradation" [Mikhailov V. V. The totalitarian state and its socio-cultural policy in the field of physical culture : abstract of the dissertation of the candidate of philosophical sciences. M, 2000. p. 7].

K. Lundberg was reproached for devoting more than 70 pages of the text to the very final race, which lasted less than one and a half minutes – they say it is too long and uninteresting ^[5]. However, the described race is striking in its tactical complexity, when the struggle goes on in a group of athletes for the best position after the first 100 meters of running on individual tracks. And this fight takes place at high speed and at a minimum distance between athletes in the presence of emotionally charged 800 thousand spectators. Almost every second an athlete has to make decisions on his own, taking into account and predicting a huge number of external and internal factors. Is he taught this in training, where he is obliged to obey the will of the coach, become as obedient, initiative-free, non-confrontational as possible and mechanically run segments strictly over certain distances and accurately falling into the time interval set by the mentor? This problem of the contradiction of maximum coaching control and authoritarian disciplinary practices provided by the training process, and the unpredictability of a competitive event requiring an active will and an adaptive mind of an athlete, is artistically raised by the author of the novel and makes it relevant to appeal to M. Foucault's social theory problematizing such situations, in particular to his "technologies of selfhood", allowing to resist the extremes of the domination of sovereign and the disciplinary authority.

The transgressive nature of the analyzed novel is also manifested in the debunking of philistine ideas about running, which is perceived by many as perhaps the most peaceful sport in which there is no place for aggression and violence due to its non-contact. No wonder that in the first thirteen Olympiads of Antiquity, which stopped wars, running was the only kind of competition, thus becoming a symbol of bloodless rivalry. The high stakes of the Olympic final not only dehumanize athletes, turning them into gladiators, but also deprive running of a peacemaking halo: runners slightly delay their foot so that an opponent bumps into a studded sneaker; imperceptibly beat each other with elbows; "cut off" during rebuilding, etc. As a result, Hazeneger finished with a broken nasal bone and "... with with terrible bruises from his cheek and down his left side, all the way to his knee" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 165], Jackson was hit in the stomach, Konev had a deep wound in his thigh and his whole leg was covered in blood: "It was no longer running; it was a concentrated, furious, insane struggle" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 164].

Let's briefly consider the winners and losers in the novel. The images of the losing runners are largely symbolic, since each of them embodies such personality traits or attitudes to sports that the Danish writer abhorred. Hazeneger represents the subordination of sports to a policy largely based on the manifestations of residual Nazism. Ted Jackson is characterized by lack of intelligence and eternal childishness, therefore, after losing the race, he behaves in a typical way for a 12-year-old child: he cries bitterly; as you can see, the American athlete is not through his own fault, but is deprived of the possibility of development. Vlasov is a small, untalented man, overcome by resentment: he was always in Konev's shadow, envious of his running abilities, fame and external attractiveness.

The winners include Olympic champion Jim Stoker, who was left without the Konev medal and the Erling medalist. Stoker is interesting because his conception took place outside of eugenic practices, and he also developed naturally, without genetic interventions, although he ran, as we remember, on doping. By giving the victory to a small black runner, K. Lundberg, of course, expressed his attitude to racism and harassment of African Americans in the United States, pointed out his disbelief in "pure" Olympic victories in the present and future and supported by that time the already irrelevant idea of the founder of the modern Olympic Games Pierre de Coubertin on the unification of sports and "musical" competitions. As you know, from the fifth to the fourteenth Olympiad (i.e. from 1912 to 1948), in parallel with sports competitions, contests of athleticism-related artistic works were held, divided into groups such as "Architecture", "Literature", "Music", "Painting", "Sculpture". These contests stopped because the works had to be exhibited anonymously, and venerable artists, deprived in this case of the advantage of their authority, feared a public loss. The fact that the Olympic winner was born from a musician and a former athlete demonstrates K. Lundberg's conviction in the fruitfulness of the union of bodily and spiritual principles, bringing him closer to the ancient ideal of perfection.

Konev, with his defeat at the distance, won the main award for himself – the freedom that allows him to connect with the woman he loves. After the disastrous race for the Russian athlete " (Coach – S.K.) ... cleared his throat, looked away from Konev, lowered his eyes to the floor and said in a low voice, as if passing a death sentence: "You can go wherever you want." Konev gritted his teeth to hide his happiness. He won his race. Somewhere down there, Sonya was waiting. He knew that. <...> Without looking around, he left the locker room. Towards life" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 170].

Erling, of course, embodies K. Lundberg's Olympic hope: an undisputed amateur, although he trained according to scientific methods, but outside the harsh, soul-emptying disciplinary practices and did not use doping. Erling ran fartlekes (free acceleration during running) in the moorlands of Denmark on the way to school, he competed for fun and was the only one who smiled at the start of the final race. He did not choose between victory and life, did not use mean tricks at a distance, turned out to be capable of noble deeds and did not put personal or state interests above morality ("yanteloven"), because no victory is worth dehumanizing. Erling is the very athlete as a kind of new person, for the sake of educating whom P. de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games with humanistic sports. And the Danish runner's reaction to everything that happens in the final race and after it is very indicative: "Then he turns his back to the sparkling crowd and goes into the bathroom to throw up" ["The Olympic Hope...", p. 172]. This is the last sentence in the novel, expressing the position of the author of the novel.

Conclusion

The conducted research allowed us to come to the following conclusions:

1. Modern culture is characterized by telocentricity with a special interest in the phenomenon of the moving body, one of the types of mobility of which is running locomotion as the basis of many disciplines of professional and amateur sports.

2. The study of literary works devoted to sports running allows us to determine their plot dominant as a conflict between the feeling of freedom generated by running and such properties of professional sports as fierce competition of competitive practices and authoritarian regulation of the training process.

3. Sociocultural tensions of this kind were fruitfully conceptualized in the works of Michel Foucault using the concepts of bio-power as a unity of anatomical and biopolitics; disciplinary practices as methods of normalization of bodies; supervision and panopticism as means of control, as well as technologies of self and subjectivation aimed at dampening the effects of excessive domination.

4. Knud Lundberg's fantastic sports novel "Olympic Hope: the story that happened at the 1996 Olympic Games", dedicated to the description of the life and sports practices of participants in the Olympic final 800 m race, was used as an object of application of the Fucoldian means of analyzing the above conflict situation.

5. The results of this analysis revealed four variants of bio-power: German (genetic eugenics), American (hormonal eugenics), Soviet (crippling practices) and Danish (based on the free development of natural predisposition), used to organize the birth and training of top-level runners.

6. The ideological basis of bio-power is the archaic-oriented views of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (Germany), the modernist project "a new man for a new society" (USSR), racism as a policy of ridding society of "unsuitable" people (USA) and the Scandinavian code of modesty and collectivism "Janteloven".

7. The disciplinary practices of runner training are most pronounced in totalitarian states. The methods of their implementation are specialized closed training spaces; strict daily routine; daily monotonous running exercises; constant differentiation of athletes by rating; exams in the form of competitions; medical experiments.

8. The supervision of "running bodies" is carried out by the bearers of discursive power in the form of expert knowledge, which include scientists, psychotherapists, physiologists, massage therapists, trainers, as well as panoptically controlling all employees of the special services.

9. The realization of the technologies of selfhood and subjectivation by runners is carried out in the forms of resistance (special loss of the race as a method of liberation from state coercion and total control) and transgression (suicide in case of failure to achieve victory). These technologies also turn out to be important for the successful participation of a runner in an unpredictable competitive event that requires an active will and an adaptive mind, which is unattainable within the framework of an authoritarian training process aimed at the disciplinary training of "obedient bodies".

10. K. Lundberg associates his Olympic hopes in sports running not with cruel (turning running into a battle and finishing with fractures and blood) professionals who are ready to give up their health (the problem of doping) and even their lives for the sake of personal awards and increasing the prestige of their states, but with amateur athletes educated by means of humanistic sports, for of which running has existential significance as a way of holistic, bodily and spiritual self-realization in the ethically loaded sphere of freedom.