Sporting practices and national identity in Dimitrovgrad

This article is based on the results of a shortterm exploratory study concerning practices of sporting participation and consumption among high school students in Dimitrovgrad, an ethnicallymixed border municipality in Eastern Serbia that has historically been contested with neighbouring Bulgaria. The study is founded upon the theoretical assumption that sport may be an effective tool for national cohesion. The results of the investigation suggest that young people in the area are currently more positively oriented to Serbian rather than Bulgarian elite sporting teams. However, the investigation concerning sporting participation reveals a more complicated picture in which a lack of investment in the local sporting infrastructure leads local physical education teachers and their students to look across the border to Bulgaria for sporting competition. This may have important implications concerning the development of national identities that are revealed to be far from fixed and permanent.