Why sports aerobics has never been transformed into a competitive sports discipline in Poland?: Tracing failure ethnographically

Abstract

In the latter half of the 1990s, a former member of the Polish national artistic gymnastics team, Hanna Fidusiewicz, took steps to transform sports aerobics into a national sports discipline. She ultimately failed in her endeavours. To date, Poland still has no national team in sports aerobics. The present article works through the failure ethnographically. Based on the analysis of ethnographic interviews with Hanna Fidusiewicz conducted over twenty years after the events to which they refer, this article aims to demonstrate the complexity of the relations and understandings that contributed to the constitution of failure in the specific context.