Abstract des Autors

The International Olympic Committee's (IOC) recent focus on youth has led it to create the Youth Olympic Games (YOG). Besides these young athletes, the IOC has recognized their parents and entourage as potential stakeholders. Yet, we know little about the youth and their families. What do these young, emerging athletes feel, perceive? What stresses them? Should they be 'managed' the same way as older, more established elite athletes? Moreover, through the YOG, the IOC wants to foster learning and development for the youth and sport. The latter includes athletes' entourage, notably coaches and, more broadly, team officials, who are part of the international delegations that attend the Olympic Games and YOG. The IOC also wants team officials to gain experience. Here, team official is the term the IOC uses when talking about YOG 'coaches'. In this chapter, we begin to explore the world of the young athletes at the YOG, including focusing on parents and team officials. Before doing so, we provide an overview of the methods we used. The Innsbruck 2012 Winter YOG case study was built by means of observations, interviews and questionnaires gathered/conducted during and after the event. Observations were limited to accessible areas based on the research team's accreditation level. Forty-four individuals (nine athletes, 30 parents, five team officials) were'recruited through convenience and purposeful sampling procedures (see Strauss and Corbin 1998) in order to cover the main stakeholders present (Parent et al. forthcoming-a). We focused our attention on the sport of curling as one example of the sports presented at the YOG. More precisely, the YOG curling event exemplified the differing approaches and feelings towards the YOG (and the sport), which impacted athlete training, experience and the athlete-parent-coach relationship. At the same time, the statements by the curling athletes, parents and team officials exemplify other sports. Second, we focused on two major winter sport countries, Norway and Canada; despite being dominant winter sport countries, their respective NOCs and curling federations approached the YOG differently, affecting athletes, parents and team officials. Fifty-five athletes from Norway and Canada completed the questionnaire based on the one created by MacIntosh and Nicol (2012). There were eight open-ended questions for participants to elaborate on issues and to state their experiences with the Games in their own words. All data were inductively and deductively content analysed (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Miles and Huberman 1994). (geändert)