New Thinking: Telling new sporting stories

The annual BBC Sports Personality of the Year competition with its different categories presents a very different picture from the newspaper reports studied by Dr Fiona Skillen, which congratulated sportswomen in past times by linking their success to the achievements of their fathers or brothers. And Professor Matthew Smith from the University of Strathclyde has run a project called "Out on the pitch, sport and mental health in LGBT people" which looks at both the positive side of sport and mental health, and the pressures. They talk to John Gallagher about why we need new stories about sports.

The book written by Dr Fiona Skillen from the Glasgow Caledonian University is called Women, Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain. She is now starting a project looking at women's experiences of playing golf.

You can find a BBC Radio 4 Archive Hour presented by Matthew Sweet called PE - A History of Violence on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002g6z

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Further podcasts are available on the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking website under the playlist New Research https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90

Producer: Robyn Read