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.
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