Sohini Sarkar, Smita Jha
This study argues that sporting autobiographies shaped by market incentives and stakeholder expectations reproduce neoliberal ideals that normalise meritocracy and individual responsibility. In practice, sport reflects these values through competition, disciplinary regimes and individual struggles. These books are conventionally authored by high-profile athletes who sell hope, instructions and individualised logic. Against this backdrop, this research uncovers how the autobiographies of Josh Sundquist, Lance Armstrong and Yuvraj Singh in Just Don’t Fall (2010), It’s Not About the Bike (2001) and The Test of My Life (2013), respectively, convert private resilience into marketable pedagogy and philanthropic legitimacy. It employs symptomatic reading and auto/biographical method and uses a neoliberal lens as a theoretical framework to identify three themes across the corpus: (1) early talent identification as an origin myth; (2) masochistic discipline and healthism; and (3) conversion of moral authority into branded philanthropy. These narratives normalise selection, aestheticise bodily risk, privatise care and shift public responsibilities onto private actors. Ethically, such narratives legitimise market-based remedies over systemic reform by shaping public understanding of merit and blame. The study concludes that treating sporting autobiographies as serious literary and leisure studies material is essential to displace the hagiographic, neoliberal framing currently dominating athlete autobiographies.