Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Institute of Sport, Physical Activity and Leisure, Leeds Metropolitan University, Fairfax Hall, Headingley Campus, Leeds LS6 3QS, United Kingdom
University of Bristol, United Kingdom
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 4 February 2013
Received in revised form
2 May 2013
Accepted 4 May 2013
Available online 18 May 2013
Objectives: To explore: (i) How elite and professional sport culture might steer individuals towards
particular stories, identities, and actions; (ii) How athletes navigate or respond to these cultural pressures.
Design: Cross-sectional qualitative methodology.
Method: Narrative interviews and focus groups with 21 elite and professional athletes followed by a
narrative analysis of structure and form.
Results: Athletes demonstrated one of three processes. Individuals who live the part of athlete story their
life and act in ways that conform to a culturally dominant performance narrative. Here, identity is
foreclosed, relationships sacriced in the pursuit of success, and long-term wellbeing threatened. Over
time, alternative narrative types may provoke moral reection on their story and actions. Individuals
who resist the part of athlete sustain a life story and identity that deviates from the performance narrative,
drawing on alternative narrative types. Their resistance is typically overt as they publicly demonstrate
actions that align with their multidimensional story. Individuals who play the part of athlete modify their
story and actions depending on sociocultural context. These individuals covertly maintain a multidimensional life story, but silence this story when powerful others require performance stories.
Conclusions: Although some elite/professional athletes life stories revolve around performance outcomes, this is not a prerequisite for excellence. Other athletes achieve excellence while sustaining a
multidimensional life story and identity. To do so, they navigate a culture that expects a performance
focus, through overt resistance or covertly manipulating their public stories and actions.
2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Culture
Identity
Mental health
Professional sport
Story
Wellbeing
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Findings
The data for this study were collected during a research project
commissioned by the UK Sport Council (Douglas & Carless, 2006b)
and approved by the ethics committee at Kitrinas institution. The
participants comprised 21 elite and professional athletes (11 female, 10 male) between 18 and 44 years of age and registered on
the UK Sport Councils athlete support program. Participants were
drawn from the following sports: track and eld athletics, rowing,
rugby union, swimming, cricket, judo, canoeing, hockey, and
netball.
Because researching elites raises challenges in terms of access
and recruitment (Hertz & Imber, 1995), we needed to be exible
and adaptable in terms of, for example, how and when we collected
data to take account of participants schedules and geographical
location. To balance this requirement with our aims, we employed
two methods of data collection: focus groups and one-to-one interviews. Initially, a series of ve focus groups were arranged and
conducted for those individuals who were able to make prearranged times and locations. Subsequently, ve one-to-one interviews were conducted to suit those individuals who were unable
to attend a focus group. All interviews and focus groups were
recorded and transcribed verbatim.
We utilized a similar approach in the interviews and focus groups
that sought e in line with narrative life story approaches (see
Crossley, 2000; Lieblich et al., 1998; Plummer, 2001) e biographical,
historical, and cultural context for each participants current life
situation and experiences. Kitrina conducted the in-depth interviews and led the focus groups. As a professional sportsperson,
Kitrina is an insider to the population of study and this, we felt,
increased the depth of conversations, helping participants feel sufciently secure to be candid in the stories they shared. David played
an active role in focus groups, noting key issues as they emerged and
engaging in the conversation to clarify, contrast, or prompt further
narrative development. Being an outsider to the population, David
brought an alternative perspective to the focus groups and subsequent analysis and interpretation.
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(i.e., can be put into practice). In this sense, we are never entirely
free to invent our life story; instead, our personal story is shaped
and constrained by our embodied experience of the world. At the
same time, through the process of interpellation (Frank, 2010),
stories call on a person to behave or act in ways that are appropriate
to its plot. The two e embodied experience and story e therefore
exist in a reciprocal relationship, with each affecting the other.
On this basis, and in light of career transition research among
elite sportspeople (e.g., Carless & Douglas, 2009; Douglas & Carless
2009a; McKenna & Thomas, 2007; Sparkes, 1998), Alexs story may
be regarded as a positive one from the perspective of long-term
development and psychosocial wellbeing. A particular feature of
his story is a refusal to adopt an exclusive athletic identity in favor
of sustaining a broad-based, multidimensional identity. While at
times this places Alexs story in tension with elite sport culture, he
reasons that this friction is worthwhile for the benets it brings.
In previous work (Douglas & Carless, 2006a), we have shown
that the dominant performance script insists that, to be successful
at the elite or professional level, athletes must be single-minded,
resist other facets of life, and relegate relationships. For tellers of
performance tales, So total is the focus on sport performance, that
the person and the job become inseparable (p. 20). This is clearly
not the case for athletes like Alex who achieve excellence while
overtly resisting the monological performance narrative, storying
their lives instead around the contours of a dialogical relational
and/or discovery narrative. They exhibit an overt form of resistance
that has much in common with the regular and dyadic resistance
reported among some aging bodybuilders (Phoenix & Smith, 2011).
Playing the part of athlete
A third group of athletes consciously play the part of athlete by
publicly telling and enacting performance stories, while privately
sustaining a multidimensional life story and set of behaviors based
on alternative narrative types. Tony (a 24 year-old professional
rugby union player) is one such individual, whose life story demonstrates relational and discovery threads. This excerpt, shared
while talking about his attempts to regain a place in the rst team
following an injury, provides an illustration:
[I] went to see him [the coach] and said, Look, I thought Ive
been playing well for the second team, whats happened the last
couple of months? And he said, Well, you havent been to see
me. Your attitude stinks. Basically my tness coach had snaked
me and said I hadnt done any extras and what killed me was I
had to go and see him for him to tell me this. If I had known that
that was the way I was being perceived then I would have done
something about it. I wouldnt have done anything drastic
because I felt like I was working hard anyway but I would have
probably done something so that they know Ive been working
hard, sort of thing. For an example, they do a core group e like
core stability through here every morning at 8 oclock. Theres
special people need to do it, so once I got this bollocking for
being last, being perceived as being lazy, the next day I went to
this core group e and to be quite honest with you I dont think it
makes any difference e and I went and did it for a week.
So the sole reason youre doing it is to be perceived as more serious?
Yeah. So I go in there, get my folder, Im in there at 8 oclock
every morning with one other bloke, something like that, and
then I got a tick for saying Im in there and then Im perceived for
doing work. Its not really made that much difference to my
body, but to the way they perceive me its massive. By the end of
the two weeks: Oh, his attitude has really changed. Know what
I mean? And it was bollocks and we knew it was bollocks! Every
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