ABSTRACT
How do athletes become athletes? This is the question which drew me to this research. Where do athletes come from, and how is it that only some people get to be members of national teams, get to go to the Olympics, get to be professional athletes? The popular images we have from biographies and journalistic reports about such elite athletes-the Michael Jordans, Wayne Gretzkys, Janet Evanses, and Martina Hingises-is that somehow their journeys to the top were predestined. They were so good, so talented, that their progression to stardom was inevitable and unproblematic-a triumphant parade, almost. Yet, my own experience of sport, and those of my friends around me, was really not at all like that. My sport career, our sport careers, were not at all smooth sailing. And we saw so many talented people dropping by the wayside who lost interest, did not get picked for a select team, took up with boyfriend/girlfriend, fell out with the coach, decided to play in a band, got blocked by sport bureaucrats, and so on. We all know, sort of intuitively, that success in sport is not just merely a matter of having the necessary talent.
