ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sports Act. Living
Sec. Sports Coaching: Performance and Development
This article is part of the Research TopicHigh Performance Sports Coaching and Athlete TransitionView all 5 articles
"You can't tee them up for retirement because we have to go out and win gold medals…": A Foucauldian Exploration of Olympic Coaching Logic and Athletic retirement
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Hull, Hull, United Kingdom
- 2University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom
- 3Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia
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Despite decades of research into the phenomena of athletic retirement, many modern athletes continue to report difficulties in adjusting to life beyond sport. As a result, the issue of athletic retirement has become a significant concern for those working within high-performance settings. However, there remains a distinct lack of critical attention regarding how key actors within athletes' lives (e.g. coaches) shape and impact upon their capacities to adjust to post-sport life. In this paper, we address this gap in research by presenting qualitative data from interviews with eight coaches working in the context of Olympic sport in the United Kingdom to examine their perspectives regarding the athlete retirement process. Drawing upon Foucault's conceptualization of disciplinary power-knowledge, our analysis illustrates how Olympic coaches' perspectives and experiences of athletic retirement can be linked to the modernist logic and normalizing pressures that characterize Olympic level coaching environments.
Keywords: Athletic Retirement1, Sport Coaching2, Olympics3, High-Performance Sport4, Foucault5
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 05 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Boardman, Jones, Toner and Avner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Luke Jones, ljj36@bath.ac.uk
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