The Educational Project in the Context of High-Performance Sports

Abstract

The requirements of performance sport are becoming more and more time-consuming for athletes. Based on the work of Rosa, the article looks into the ability of athletes to reconcile their training project and the increasing requirements of practice at a high level. To address this issue, we interviewed 63 high-level French athletes who train at the French Institute of Sport. The results show that although the training project appears to be time-consuming, it is nonetheless a source of social balance and a reassuring choice for their future professional retraining. In order to preserve this educational project in the time-consuming context of high-performance sports, athletes on the one hand implement strategies of arrangement in order to produce an acceptable timetable, and on the other hand use this temporality as an adjustment variable allowing them to better manage temporal emergencies. By giving athletes a voice, this work deconstructs the idea of the incompatibility of educational and sports projects and offers recommendations to sports institutions.