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Managing Essentials

International After the Olympics: The problems problems of postpost-athletics careers


The 2012 Olympics is over. For many athletes the event constituted the highlight of their sporting career. For most it was really all about participation, a few of them won a medal, but all of them will sooner or later face a new challenge with what to do after their sports career is over? This question comes up for many athletes relatively early in life. Only in a very few disciplines like long distance running can top performance levels be achieved for athletes above 30 years old. However all of them prepared over many years for this event in training, pre-qualifications and the championships of their discipline. With a few exceptions it was not only a time of physical but also of financial hardship. Some athletes receive sponsorship from their government or academic institutions. The medal table is actually an indicator of the extent to which countries financially support their athletes. Mostly however these grants are normally just sufficient to cover the costs of living and travel to competitions. The Olympic Games highlight a problem often overlooked as sports media coverage tends to be dominated by professional sports. The majority of athletes are amateurs; not earning money from their sport but needing money to engage in it. A gold medal may earn eternal fame, but most disciplines are not attractive enough to bring about advertising contracts. Women especially have little chance of winning commercial sponsorship. For professional sports the picture is only slightly better with only a very few athletes being able to live on savings made during their career; their careers are just too short. Soccer is a sport with a comparably long career but only a fraction of players can play for more than 15 years. In the US for American football the numbers are disputed with the director of the players union giving an average of 3.3 years, and the director of the league saying it is 6 years. But even if 6 years is correct, half of the players drop out before this time, often for health reasons caused by injuries. As successful as a sports career has been, the circumstances of the career change are often not very pleasant. Health problems and being deselected often for being out-performed by the upcoming new generation are the main reasons for ending ones sports career. The dissertation of Zhijian Huang lists several empirical studies about the problems athletes encounter at the end of their career. The results of the studies depend on variables like discipline and professionalism, but overall around 20% of all athletes encounter severe psychological problems ranging from depression to substance abuse to suicide attempts. Holly Wallis from the BBC highlights, that the Olympic also-rans, often placed far down the results tables are often local heroes in their respective countries and are treated there with an attention and admiration they may lose when leaving the field. The lack of fame and glory is accompanied by the fact that the athletes sport becomes the center of their social life over the years and missing the social aspect of sport is the most encountered problem when

Managing Essentials
International
a career ends. Some athletes experience a social death when leaving their discipline. In the stadium athletes demonstrate all the attributes regularly looked for in job applicants; passion, commitment and the readiness to endure, learn and train. Shouldnt these attributes also form a basis for a new career? Often they do, but these attributes are developed in strict regimes set up by coaches and academies. What appears as individual self-determination in the stadium is the result of a collective effort in which the athletes, often still children or young adults, follow not only their own ambitions but also those of coaches and sometimes their parents. Secondly, the skills learned are evidently very domain specific. The saying abilities tend to generalize is questionable in general; with regard to bodily abilities it is rarely true. Starting in the late 1980s some countries like Australia, Canada, Germany and the USA developed and implemented programs to ease the transition into a new career for former athletes. Typically career plans outside sports are developed and the athletes receive guidance and counseling and sometimes the programs even contain direct vocational training. Since the transition is perceived by many of them as a traumatic event, therapeutic assistance plays a major role. The courses are in high demand and rated very favorably. The transition process normally takes around two years, but sometimes, and depending on the criteria used for completion it can take up to ten years. Up to now, very little is known about the success of these programs and how former athletes perform in their later careers. The programs are too few, too scattered and too recent for representative follow-up studies. However, in a recent book by Pia-Maria Wippert, a professor of sports sociology from Potsdam University in Germany, who is also a former member of the German alpine team, gives a pessimistic assessment. She states that the transition often does not succeed and athletes underperform in their subsequent careers. She estimates that about 50,000 former participants of the Olympics did not succeed in crossing the poverty line. The problem of post-athletic careers is interesting because the need of a fundamental professional reorientation is not limited to athletes, but can come up in many individuals lives. In the last twenty years especially the global dynamic of economies has abolished the principle of lifelong employment which was an explicit or implicit characteristic of big corporations in many industrialized countries. The attempt to become lean has axed out levels of management. Outsourced short term contracts have replaced internal positions and the percentage of workers just leased on time but not permanently hired has increased. In addition, the stereotype of the successful serial entrepreneur has emerged. He and more rarely she, is the person with the ability to turn whatever comes their way into gold. This picture is however, misleading. In most cases, the later serial entrepreneurs have only one major business success which creates the base of their capital. Afterwards, with this money

Managing Essentials
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they run business experiments which statistically however are not more successful than companies created by other people. Its likely to have three hits if you can afford a hundred shots as permanently innovating companies in high-tech sectors demonstrate. Therefore from a lifetime perspective the athletes demonstrate two lessons. Firstly, that professional reorientation is very difficult even if you have been very successful in your previous career. There is not only the problem of new skills to be learned, but the transition is a critical life event including the possible upheaval of the social life. It may take years for them to become accomplished in the new area and sometimes failure may occur. Secondly, where possible it is wise to keep a wider perspective rather than concentrate on a deep specialization. The wider perspective will make it easier to reorientate.
London 2012: The Olympic also-rans (Holly Wallis) www.managing-essentials.com/2hw Athletic Career Transition in Former Chinese Elite Athletes: An Empirical Investigation and Cross-Cultural Comparison with Findings from Germany (Zhijian Huang) www.managing-essentials.com/2hx Pia-Maria Wippert (2012).: Kritische Lebensereignisse in Hochleistungsbiographien. Untersuchungen an Spitzensportlern, Tnzern und Musikern. Pabst, Lengerich/Berlin/Wien

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