INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

stretching our skills to meet the challenge provided by an opponent.
However, if one is concerned with extrinsic goals, such as winning or
wanting to impress an audience (or indeed taking a bribe for financial
gain!), then the task becomes a distraction, rather than an incentive to
focus consciousness on.
These messages are as resonant for IOC members and the man in
the street as they are for elite sports performers. Torres (2002)
suggests that, “The causes of the departure from the ideals of the
Olympism… are many but money is at its centre. The stakes were high
and the temptations many”. However, by creating conditions for flow
in our sport and in our life in general, all of us will have the
opportunity to live more Olympically.
Case study: Student-athletes
In my doctoral research on elite British ‘student-athletes’ - those
individuals who are variously committed to both their studies and their
sport – I have found that the major demand they must contend with
relates to the Olympic ideal of “combining in a balanced whole the
qualities of body, will and mind” or as Mihalich (1984) puts it, “the
rationale for college sports (which) reduces to the need to educate the
total person in pursuit of human excellence”. In essence, my thesis
takes a psychological angle at the ways these dual role individuals
cope with potential role-conflict. The current need for such
information is provided by such documents as the BOA Athletes
Commission Report for the Sydney Olympic Games which found that
60% of Team GB had a HND, degree or higher (an increase of 7%
from 1996) and that 20% were in some form of education at the time
of the Games (BOA, 2000).
The rationale I have used is to identify those student-athletes who
are coping well with the multiple demands of being both student and
athlete and to identify their natural strategies for negotiating the
collegiate environment. This data contributed to the design of
preventative and developmentally oriented interventions. Rather than
encourage student-athletes to sacrifice (usually) their academic role
and exclusively identify with their athletic role, I have found that a
much more adaptive and ‘healthier’ (in terms of transitions out of
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