The conditions for high performance have changed considerably over the last few years. Athletes must spend more time training and competing, devote a lot of time to mental, physical and nutritional professionals and continue to respond to some constraints such as studying, spending time with their families, friends and quality of life. In this context and based on the work of Rosa, we wonder about the capacity of elite athletes to combine all these constraints, namely to manage the acceleration in their pace of life, in order to be able to achieve always more and better in the same time unit. To address this issue, we interviewed 42 French high-level athletes who train at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (INSEP). Results show that to suit their goals, athletes implement arrangement and adjustment strategies aimed at making the time they have wholly useful and efficient. This time constraint puts athletes in a perpetual state of tension, on the verge of a good or poor life. The paper shows how the question of time, and particularly the acceleration of pace of life, is vital for modern sporting performance.

The goal of this article is to present the output of a study on women who play rugby union at international level. This article aims to uncover the steps in their sport socialization-in rugby among others-and to understand how these women construct their identities. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 players from the French national rugby union women's team. First, the results show that the players have varied sport and rugby socializations. Sport socialization happened at an early age for most of the players, but two different subgroups seem to emerge vis-à-vis rugby socialization: members of the second underwent socialization through their family for many years, while members of the other were not as exposed to rugby. As far as the identity question is concerned, the players present different constructions vis-à-vis social norms. The results show that a majority of women say they do not feel the need to meet social norms said to be feminine, while others want to in order to free themselves from the masculine identity caused by the fact that they play rugby. Lastly, some of the players set limits on this double identity, which is sometimes identified as a constraint.

Sports and physical activities are ideal fields to study gender construction. Much research aims at shedding light on these processes. Women involved in 'male' sports have been extensively studied, and mixed-sex activities have sometimes been used to support these studies, but research has rarely focused on populations of disabled athletes. Yet, the phenomenon of gender construction takes on a particular meaning in the context of disability, insofar as the relations between sports, gender and disability raise the issues of production and negotiation of bodily norms in a specific way. We will try to understand this gender construction phenomenon through the study of ten French powerchair football players, with whom we conducted a participant observation over two and a half years, as well as in-depth interviews. We will pay particular attention to the case of three sportswomen who competed in an almost exclusively male champion ship. We will see that these women are confronted with a dilemma: going against the stereotype of the asexual Paralympian female athlete while performing masculinity to gain legitimacy in a men's world. These sportswomen thus 'play the game' of masculinity through a set of discursive, behavioral and clothing strategies in order to find a place in powerchair football, while still preserving some of their 'femininity.'

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This article examines how high-performance sport coaches combine their professional and family lives. To address this issue, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 41 French coaches (8 females, 33 males) involved in the preparation of the French teams for the Olympic Games in Rio (2016), Pyeongchang (2018) and/or Tokyo (2020). The results show that all the coaches interviewed are engaged in a passionate relationship with their job. For some coaches, this commitment has an impact on their family life. Three groups of coaches stand out: (i) a majority of coaches who are unable to preserve their family life, (ii) coaches who maintain a distance from their profession and preserve their family life, (iii) coaches who have or have not preserved their family life and who position themselves as actors wishing to do everything possible to preserve the family life of the coaches they supervise. Thus, these results highlight, for some coaches, difficulties in combining professional and family life. For others, family life is a protection for engagement in a passionate profession. These data can provide useful information for sport organizations in charge of coaches.

Through its commitment to universalism, the inclusion of disabled people has become an increasingly prominent objective of the Paralympic Games. To achieve this, the organisers rely on the notion of legacy, which refers to the expected effects of major sporting events on host countries. This notion was initially founded on material aspects and then took an interest in certain intangible sides that were spotted within the organiser’s goals and studied in literature. Building on the historical literature about the Paralympic movement’s institutionalization, this article shows that this institutionalization took place in a context of tension between disabled communities, depending on their proximity to the Olympic model. What is the impact of this historical legacy in terms of inclusion of the greater number? By shedding light on the historical perspective of the obstacles encountered in the creation of an ‘all-disabilities’ sporting event, this article aims to discuss and challenge the current perspective on the inclusive legacy of the Paralympic Games.

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