Conditioned Spaces, Conditioned Thoughts?

This chapter examines the ethical contradictions of high-performance sport through an autoethnographic account of complicity, silence, and re-orientation. Drawing on experiences as both a doctoral student and international-level athlete in the 2010s, the author reflects on why critical reflexivity, encouraged and enacted in higher education, was absent within a toxic sporting environment led by a coach later banned for abusive practices. Using the theory of Practice Architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014), the chapter interrogates how cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements within elite sport conditioned silence, normalised harm, and suppressed ethical judgement, even among those trained to question power. The analysis situates a vignette of ableist humour within broader systemic features of UK performance sport, revealing how win-at-all-costs logics, hierarchical authority, and outcome-driven funding structures enabled complicity and institutional betrayal. In contrast, higher education offered a parallel site that cultivated reflexivity, critique, and ethical deliberation, prompting reflection on the transferability of such dispositions across domains. Post-retirement, the process of re-authoring a professional identity in coaching and academia is framed as an ongoing negotiation with entrenched practice traditions, demanding intentional disruption of toxic legacies and cultivation of more inclusive, dialogic, and caring practices. The chapter concludes with provocations for coaches, educators, and policymakers, highlighting how PA provides a lens to audit and transform practice sites, and arguing that meaningful change requires collective reflexivity, structural reform, and a commitment to re-orienting sport towards more humane and ethical futures.