Abstract:Au cours des dernières décennies, les recherches articulant sport et travail se sont beaucoup développées. Elles portent sur un large ensemble de questions comme le fonctionnement des organisations sportives, les carrières des sportifs de haut niveau, la croissance d'un secteur économique et de métiers de l'intervention sportive, les migrations internationales des sportifs, les discriminations sexuelles ou raciales dans l'accès aux marchés du travail sportif, etc. Ici nous mettons l'accent sur une dimension, c… Show more
Sport and work are usually identified as opposites, but there are several ways that sport is work‐like and a number of ways that sport is related to work. Although it is commonplace to refer to professional sports as a business, popular resentment about the high salaries of some professional athletes in some sports is related to the sense that sport is not work. However, sport and work have become metaphors for each other; while businesses frequently use sporting metaphors to refer to competition, teamwork, productivity and “coaching,” Taylorism, the scientific management and measurement of work, found its way into coaching and training principles in sports.
Sport and work are usually identified as opposites, but there are several ways that sport is work‐like and a number of ways that sport is related to work. Although it is commonplace to refer to professional sports as a business, popular resentment about the high salaries of some professional athletes in some sports is related to the sense that sport is not work. However, sport and work have become metaphors for each other; while businesses frequently use sporting metaphors to refer to competition, teamwork, productivity and “coaching,” Taylorism, the scientific management and measurement of work, found its way into coaching and training principles in sports.
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.
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