HERESY AS A VICTORIOUS POLITICAL PRACTICE: Grass-Roots Politics in Norwegian Sports 1972-1975

This article deals with a question of sport politics: the fight for female participation in the most popular running competition in Norway between 1972 and 1975. The focus is on the process from doxa (what we take for granted), through heterodoxa (the effort to challenge the doxa) and finally `winning the game'. Most research in sport politics has concentrated on formal politics in sports organizations and official political aims of the state, but not, as in this article, on informal counter-cultural movements and `ad-hoc groups'. This is also an example of how private experiences become official stories. The approach used is that of the life story (my own personal account of a particular experience), with some elements of life history (in the sense that I am placing my story into a particular cultural, social and political context). In addition to Bourdieu's concepts of doxa, heterodoxa and symbolic power, Mary Douglas's symbolic systems of purity and dirt are used in the analysis. The article demonstrates, through the life-history method, how sport interlinked with gender politics and wider political alliances can challenge the sports establishment.