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The holistic ecological approach to talent development in sport highlights the central role of the overall environment as it affects a prospective elite athlete. This paper examines a flat-water kayak environment in Norway with a history of successfully producing top-level senior athletes from among its juniors. Principal methods of data collection include interviews, participant observations of daily life in the environment and analysis of documents. The environment was centered around the relationship between prospects and a community of elite athletes, officially organized as a school team but helping the athletes to focus on their sport goals, teaching the athletes to be autonomous and responsible for their own training, and perceived as very integrated due to a strong and cohesive organizational culture. We argue that the holistic ecological approach opens new venues in talent development research and holds the potential to change how sport psychology practitioners work with prospective elite athletes.

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This study examined cross-cultural differences between Russian and British children’s physical self-perceptions and physical activity levels. The relationship between physical self-perceptions and physical activity behavior was also investigated. Two hundred and fifty-two Russian children (118 boys, 134 girls) and 240 British children (113 boys, 127 girls) aged 13 to 14 years completed Whitehead and Corbin’s (32) Physical Self-Perception Profile for Children (PSPP-C) and the leisure time exercise questionnaire (11). Results showed that boys from both nationalities were significantly more active than their female counterparts, and Russian boys participated in more moderate intensity activity than British girls. Multisample confirmatory factor analyses revealed that Russian and British children appraised the PSPP-C subdomains in similar ways, but the fit of the data to the hypothesized model was unsatisfactory. Russian children exhibited gender differences on all of the PSPP-C subdomains, but there was only one gender difference for the body-attractiveness subdomain in British children.