Lift up your arms! : elite athletes and cold war childhoods

This chapter turns to configurations of athleticism, child bodies, and the instrumental uses of sport as a form of soft power. We work with memory stories of children selected to become elite athletes within the diverse geopolitical timespaces of the Cold War in East Germany, Romania, and Hungary. We follow trajectories of selection, training, and injury as we trace formations of sporting subjectivities as discursive, affective, relational, and material. In close readings of each of the stories, we consider desire and longing for sporting success, the investments of state institutions and individuals in producing elite sporting bodies, and how we might think the body through ever-present risk and intimations of freedom. In our analysis, we introduce theoretical resources on risk, memory, and the carnal body to help us to think differently about the memories and processes of collective biography as a methodology.