"Mere Managers": Ethiopian Athlete-Agent Relationships in Transnational Sport

Abstract (English)

Ethiopia is known worldwide for its long-distance runners. Since the 1960s, Ethiopian athletes have won countless Olympic medals and major marathons making it a big business in an otherwise poor country. Over the past few decades a global network of actors have formed connecting young aspirational runners from the countryside to major corporate sponsors like Nike and Adidas. Building off two years of fieldwork in Ethiopia, along with research at a U.S.-based international sports agency in Pennsylvania, and competitions in Asia and Europe, my research focuses on the lives of Ethiopian women who pursue running careers in country and abroad. This paper will focus on one of the most crucial relationships that women runners in Ethiopia form in their transnational athletic quests: the athlete-agent relationship.

In addition to sports federation officials, family members, and coaches, the athlete-agent relationship is crucial for athletic, economic, and social success. Because international agents are the mediating party between sponsors and race directors outside Ethiopia and athletes who don’t speak English and have limited education, their relationships with athletes can be tense and fraught. At the same time, they can be meaningful and exceptional. Often, the language of kinship inundates these athlete-agent spaces; it yields insight into the ways in which the lexicon of family is used to both mask unfair relations and respond to new associations between parties. However, as managers and athletes attempt to form contractual agreements, the paper will explore how racist and sexist inequalities are reproduced through reiterative contractual means.

Negotiations over athletes’ labor raise questions about hegemonic ideas about work, fairness, legality, and morality. My paper will show that while agents often assert that Ethiopian athletes “don’t understand the business” this is often untrue; rather, through disagreement, Ethiopian women contest hegemonic understandings of how the athletics market operates.