Hélène Joncheray

The life of high-level athletes: The challenge of high performance against the time constraint

The conditions for high performance have changed considerably over the last few years. Athletes must spend more time training and competing, devote a lot of time to mental, physical and nutritional professionals and continue to respond to some constraints such as studying, spending time with their families, friends and quality of life. In this context and based on the work of Rosa, we wonder about the capacity of elite athletes to combine all these constraints, namely to manage the acceleration in their pace of life, in order to be able to achieve always more and better in the same time unit. To address this issue, we interviewed 42 French high-level athletes who train at the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (INSEP). Results show that to suit their goals, athletes implement arrangement and adjustment strategies aimed at making the time they have wholly useful and efficient. This time constraint puts athletes in a perpetual state of tension, on the verge of a good or poor life. The paper shows how the question of time, and particularly the acceleration of pace of life, is vital for modern sporting performance.

Are there still social barriers to women's rugby?

For a long time, rugby union was reserved for men in France. The French rugby union federation only opened its doors to women in 1989. Twenty years later, we asked ourselves how and when women start playing rugby and if there are still social barriers to their practice. In order to answer this, we interviewed 15 persons who belong to the world of French rugby and almost 200 female players. The results show that people around the players are reserved, mainly for fear of the physical risk, the injuries they associate with rugby and, to a lesser extent, because they are afraid of a social risk that they may become more masculine. Our results also underline the fact that actors of the French rugby sphere do not seem to be afraid of the physical risk but that they have the perception of a social risk.

Disabled sportswomen and gender construction in powerchair football

Sports and physical activities are ideal fields to study gender construction. Much research aims at shedding light on these processes. Women involved in ‘male’ sports have been extensively studied, and mixed-sex activities have sometimes been used to support these studies, but research has rarely focused on populations of disabled athletes. Yet, the phenomenon of gender construction takes on a particular meaning in the context of disability, insofar as the relations between sports, gender and disability raise the issues of production and negotiation of bodily norms in a specific way. We will try to understand this gender construction phenomenon through the study of ten French powerchair football players, with whom we conducted a participant observation over two and a half years, as well as in-depth interviews. We will pay particular attention to the case of three sportswomen who competed in an almost exclusively male champion ship. We will see that these women are confronted with a dilemma: going against the stereotype of the asexual Paralympian female athlete while performing masculinity to gain legitimacy in a men’s world. These sportswomen thus ‘play the game’ of masculinity through a set of discursive, behavioral and clothing strategies in order to find a place in powerchair football, while still preserving some of their ‘femininity.’

Identity socialization and construction within the French national rugby union women's team.

The goal of this article is to present the output of a study on women who play rugby union at international level. This article aims to uncover the steps in their sport socialization – in rugby among others – and to understand how these women construct their identities. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 players from the French national rugby union women’s team. First, the results show that the players have varied sport and rugby socializations. Sport socialization happened at an early age for most of the players, but two different subgroups seem to emerge vis-à-vis rugby socialization: members of the second underwent socialization through their family for many years, while members of the other were not as exposed to rugby. As far as the identity question is concerned, the players present different constructions vis-à-vis social norms. The results show that a majority of women say they do not feel the need to meet social norms said to be feminine, while others want to in order to free themselves from the masculine identity caused by the fact that they play rugby. Lastly, some of the players set limits on this double identity, which is sometimes identified as a constraint.

Les processus d’engagement et de désengagement dans la pratique du rugby à XV. Effets de l’expérience rugbystique chez des joueurs adolescents

This article investigates the processes that allow teenagers to get involved in, and commit themselves to, rugby in the long term. Involvement in and disengagement from a sports activity depend upon various processes; the main hypothesis here is that the reasons for disengagement differ depending on how long the person has been playing rugby. One thousand four hundred and two (1402) teenagers currently affiliated with the French Rugby Federation were surveyed using a questionnaire. The results suggest that special attention paid to the first year of involvement, especially with regard to injuries, could lead to a drop in disengagement. Longer-term attention to maintaining the pleasure derived from playing rugby could also lengthen involvement.