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Record W4407344528 · doi:10.1080/13573322.2025.2461616

Winning-at-all-costs: high-performance athletes learn to conform to the sport ethic

2025· article· en· W4407344528 on OpenAlexaff
Sarah McGee, Michael Atkinson, Ashley Stirling

Bibliographic record

VenueSport Education and Society · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicSport Psychology and Performance
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsAthletesPsychologySociology of sportPhysical educationPedagogySociologyGender studiesPhysical therapy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Athletes ‘learn’ to conform to the extensive pressures and expectations within the culture of sport; however, an understanding of the process by which athletes learn to conform to the sport ethic is not well known. As high performing athletes’ over-conformity to traditional sport values has been linked to negative health consequences (e.g. overtraining, playing while injured, disordered eating, engagement in hazing, chronic pain management, performance-enhancing substance abuse and risk for maltreatment), it is crucial that we better understand the process by which athletes learn to conform to these extreme expectations within sport. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine high-performance athletes’ experiences of conforming to the sport ethic and the process by which they adhere to these dominant sport values. A total of 13 retired, competitive, women athletes from a variety of sports participated in this study and engaged in a 1-to-2-hour semi-structured interview. Data were analysed thematically. Generated themes include the development of athletes’ conformity to the sport ethic through their initial sport engagement, modelling and observing, positive reinforcement and fear of repercussion. Additionally, athletes experienced both maladaptive and adaptive long-term outcomes stemming from their learned sport ethic which stuck with them post-sport involvement. Findings are interpreted using Bandura’s theoretical perspective of observational learning and future directions are recommended.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: Observational
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.105
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.340
Teacher spread0.325 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations6
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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