- Marie Loka Øydna is a PhD fellow at the Department of Sport and Social Science.
- She will defend her dissertation on 24 September: "Becoming an athlete, remaining other: A Foucauldian reading of athlete commitment in a lower secondary sports school in Norway"
- Download a PDF version of the dissertation.
- Learn more about the project.
- Watch the defense live on NIH's YouTube channel.
About the Study
Holistic athlete development has become a widespread care philosophy in Norwegian talent development. Lower secondary sports schools have emerged as a new model for this philosophy, where young athletes aged 13 to 16 are expected to combine athletic ambitions and schooling in a sustainable way. However, the question remains whether talent development takes on new forms within such a model and what consequences this has for the everyday lives of student-athletes, both as athletes and as young people.
In this study, I have been interested in exploring the opportunities for athlete commitment that this integration of holistic development opens up. Furthermore, I have sought to remain open to the possibility that equipping young people with evidence-based recommendations on training and recovery could produce unforeseen consequences for their efforts to maintain an identity as a committed athlete.
Together with my colleagues, I have examined the new standard of talent development realized by one lower secondary sports school and interviewed a selection of students about how they navigate the expectations and demands placed on a “seriously committed athlete” to train properly and safeguard their health.
Our analyses highlight a specific risk that practitioners in the field should be aware of. There might be aspects of this model for talent development that may contribute to a somewhat narrow understanding of what it means to be a “whole” (sports)person. Part of this can be explained by the increasing expectations of what it means to be a serious athlete, including heightened demands for training load, recovery, and performance expectations from clubs.
At the same time, we observe that the normalization of balancing sports and school through recommended self-management strategies often requires 100% dedication. For some student-athletes, this can lead to a sense of lack of leisure time or alternative pathways, particularly when they face setbacks or uncertainty in their development.
I believe we should be cautious about assuming that young athletes’ challenges can be resolved simply by providing them with more knowledge and expert advice. An alternative approach is to explore multiple scenarios with them, make different considerations and unintended consequences visible, and allow them to influence how problems are addressed. Such participation also involves giving young athletes the space to choose beyond what the performance logic dictates, without their choices immediately being met with mistrust from adults. At the same time, the surrounding environments can take their share of responsibility.
A recommendation to prioritize rest lacks credibility if match and training schedules, timetables, and cultural norms about the “24-hour athlete” continue to make leisure time difficult. Care, therefore, is not only about helping young athletes make the “right” choices for themselves but also about creating conditions that make more options accessible, both for those with and without talent status.
Results
The analyses show that the sports class and its standards for training and long-term development create a distinct developmental pathway for young people as athletes. This pathway reflects the ambition of the school to develop responsible athletes and people.
A responsible athlete is someone who takes ownership over their own development by adhering to principles of “best practice”, with the standards for systematic and goal-directed training and recovery impacting the student-athletes. At the same time, it is also a sign of taking responsibility for themselves when student-athletes push back against those who try to dictate their actions. However, this way of demonstrating responsibility seems primarily accessible to student-athletes who already meet the standard and whose potential or dedication to sports is not questioned.
The analyses also reveal certain costs associated with this standard for talent development, which integrates school and sports. Many student-athletes report that, even though they have sufficient knowledge to make the “right” choices, they experience conflicting pressures to balance recovery with optimizing their time use to meet the demands from both arenas.
However, it is worth noting that most student-athletes view these challenges as conditions they are willing to accept, even though they find them burdensome at times. In this context, it is important to highlight that as the selection of so-called talented athletes intensifies in clubs and sport federations, and as access to support systems becomes unevenly distributed, student-athletes may have differing perspectives on these costs.
In my view, this raises an ethical question we should be careful not to overlook. As support and coordination measures increasingly follow talent status, we risk creating a situation where some athletes’ overall workload is seen as a shared responsibility, while others are left to manage it on their own.
We could therefore ask whether current recommendations and discussions about young athletes’ total load also take into account those who are not part of the prioritized talent networks, or whether our support systems unintentionally contribute to making certain athletes less visible.
Program
- 10:15–11:00: Trial lecture
- 13:00–16:00: Defense of the dissertation
Committee
Leader: Josef Fahlen, Professor, Department of Sport and Social Sciences, NIH
First opponent: Louise Kamuk Storm, Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark
Second opponent: Håkan Larsson, Professor, The Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences
Main Supervisor: Christian Thue Bjørndal, Associate Professor, Dept. of Sport and Social Sciences, NIH
Co-supervisor: Jens Christian Nielsen, Head of Analysis, Kulturens Analyseinstitut, Denmark
Practical Information
The defense will be chaired by Rector Aage Radmann.
The defense is public and will be streamed on NIH's YouTube channel.