Sports media does a great job of telling you where your team is on the ladder, or how many ranking points your favourite player needs to make world number one. But Ben Clement was interested in all the stories that surround sport – like the origins of bicycle polo, or why Gatorade dunking became a thing, or the lengths parents will go to get their kids to practice.

So, 10 years ago the Melbourne-based photographer and art director started Good Sport, an annual(ish) publication that sees sports as a jumping-off point for just about everything else. Issue six of Good Sport is out now, so Broadsheet caught up with Clement to talk about sport as identity, the allure of print and why run clubs have taken over our cities.

How did Good Sport come to be?
As a photographer, I’d been working around publishing for a number of years shooting a lot of fashion, music and lifestyle. But I wanted to start exploring sport. Sports magazines look very commercial and I wanted to put a different spin on it. So I did a sports-focused print project, which I thought would be a one-off, called Good Sport. That was the birth of issue one.

Where’s the team based? We used to be in different parts of the world, but we’re all here in Melbourne now. There are three or four of us that all work on it in different capacities. And we have photographers and writers all around the world.

Good Sport is almost entirely print-focused. Why is that? I just really love print. Growing up in a small town in New Zealand, my first exposure to images and stories was through magazines. Being able to make something that goes out into the world is pretty cool.

Issue six just came out. How’s it going? We launched in Melbourne at the end of last year and now it’s rolling out to international stockists. With each issue, we like to do multiple things for it throughout the year. It does justice to our stories and contributors. So we’re planning our European launch right now and we’ll probably do something for Melbourne Design Week too. Because we only do issues annually, or thereabouts, the stories in the magazine have a long shelf life.

What’s the current issue about? The whole theme of the issue is about sport functioning as a sort of prop or an illusion. Last summer we spent a lot of time at pools like Fitzroy Pool and we noticed that people would often bring “prop” books to the pool – maybe something trendy, maybe a blockbuster or a cool magazine. And we’d wonder, “Are you actually reading this? Or is this just a social signifier?”

So we started thinking about how that might apply to sports – how the sports we play can say something about who we are, or who we’d like to be. How we sometimes use sports as a prop. Or even what props exist in sports.

What are you aiming to capture with your own sports photography – what makes a good sporting photo? Moments of inhibition, unmasked expression and performance. It’s often sweaty! For me, what makes a good sporting photo is something that makes me either feel like I was right there in the moment, or something that makes me see that sport or athlete from a perspective I could not have imagined.

You’re one of the founders of AM:PM Run Club, one of Melbourne’s longest-running run clubs. Have you been surprised by the rise of run clubs? I’m surprised by certain aspects. It was maybe destined to happen, especially after the pandemic. Our run crew basically started around the same time as Good Sport, and back then running was still seen as quite a weirdo thing. Not many people did it, or at least they very much did it by themselves, so it was quite hard to get our club off the ground.

When we started the run crew, people were like, “What do you mean? Why are you running as a group?” It was left-of-field to what the norm was – almost punk. Just before Covid this kind of boom in running started happening and then after Covid it was like a double boom. But with the level it’s getting to now, it just doesn’t feel sustainable, I feel like the bubble will surely burst soon.

One of the great things about Good Sport is that it celebrates amateur sports, almost more than professional sport. Is that a goal? I think amateur sports can just be more interesting. Professional athletes can do amazing things, but all professional sports photography kind of looks the same. And when you interview them – particularly the media-trained ones – their responses can be quite hard to work with. So professional sports do have this kind of commerciality.

As a magazine trying to do something a bit different, we like to talk to amateurs, or artists and people who do things adjacent to sports. We also celebrate being a spectator of sport as a truly great thing. I’m really interested in the stories and ideas in and around sport. We look for stories that have sport as an entry point but talk about so much more. That’s what fascinates us the most.

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