PROJ/I&DI/CI&DEI/004 | O CAMINHO PARA AS MEDALHAS OLÍMPICAS – PADRÕES DE TREINAMENTO E PSICOSSOCIAIS

Duration: 2022 – 2024

Principal Researcher

Antonino Pereira

Team Members

Hugo Borges Sarmento
Artur Jorge Santos
Duarte Araújo

UI&D: CI&DEI

The athlete development until achieving an excellence level is a long and complex process. This is dependent of individual characteristics but also from contextual ones, such has, family, living place, sport context. There is a clear interest to understand how to improve the athlete development, namely, the elite ones.
Moreover, we reached to a point of interest about transition phase for sport retirement as athlete, and the gender issues associated to the athlete development. The Olympic medallists are by excellence a good example of talented athletes.

The present study aims to:
a) describe (training and psychosocial patterns) and document the process the lead the athletes to achieve an Olympic medal, namely, the living Olympic medallists’ Portuguese athletes;
b) understand the development process of the athletes until reach the maximum recognition that is the Olympic medal;
c) analyse the different transitions phases, including the post-athletic phase.

The project methodology will have 4 phases:
1st - systematic review about the thematic, so we can have a deeply understanding about the research evaluation related to Olympic athletes’ development. For this we will use the PRISMA procedures.
2ª – coleta de dados para caracterizar a trajetória dos atletas até a conquista da Olimpíada Medalha – através de vídeos, relatórios oficiais, entrevistas / notícias de jornais, entre outros dados disponibilizados pela Comitê Olímpico.
3rd - consists in interviewing the medallist athletes, namely, the Portuguese ones (5 gold, 7 silver, 9 bronze – 21 in total – representing the all the Portuguese medallists still alive). The interview (semi-structured) will be organised in four parts: 1) demographic data, 2) analysis of the development of psychosocial and training patterns, 3) analyse of the transition phase characterized by the end of the sports career, 4) analyse of relevant aspects. The data collected from the interviews, specifically, those related to theoretical models will be analysed through the technical content analysis, with a priori and posteriori categorial system. For that we will use the Nvivo Software.
4th - Elaborate and apply semi-structured interview script for managers responsible by the Olympic

Mission and Preparation.
For the 3rd and 4th data analysis, we will also recur to a quantitative data analyse of the six development activities and training pattern variables and of the six psychosocial variables will be also assessed. This data will be analysed recurring to SPSS software.