{"id":94762,"date":"2024-08-01T13:01:33","date_gmt":"2024-08-01T17:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=94762"},"modified":"2024-08-01T13:02:04","modified_gmt":"2024-08-01T17:02:04","slug":"how-the-olympics-set-athletes-up-for-success-beyond-the-podium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2024\/08\/how-the-olympics-set-athletes-up-for-success-beyond-the-podium\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Olympics set athletes up for success beyond the podium"},"content":{"rendered":"

While some Olympic and Paralympic athletes are rising to glory at the Paris 2024 Games, others will see their careers come to an end when the torch goes out at the closing ceremony.<\/p>\n

Canadian basketball star Natalie Achonwa, for example, says this will be her fourth \u2014 and final \u2014 Olympics,<\/a> and other high-profile athletes are also rumoured to leave the world of competitive sport behind, post-Games.<\/p>\n

Brock University experts say the skills honed during a life of sports excellence will set these athletes up for success no matter what their next move is \u2014 but the shift to a new career will also come with challenges.<\/p>\n

Barry Wright, Dean of Brock\u2019s Goodman School of Business and CEO of the Niagara 2022\u00a0Canada Summer Games, says many athletes navigate a shift in identity when retiring from sport, for example.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/strong><\/em>You see this with professional athletes, where they will sign their name and their number beside it; it\u2019s who they are,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

As part of the Athlete365 Career+ program<\/a>, an initiative of the International Olympic Committee\u2019s Athletes\u2019 Commission, Olympians can be granted use of the post-nominal titles OLY or PLY to highlight their unique skill set to future employers.<\/p>\n

Philip Sullivan, Brock Professor of Kinesiology, whose research focuses on confidence and mental toughness, says the training Olympic athletes receive helps them develop skills that are helpful both on and off the field of play.<\/p>\n

\u201cSport psychologists work with athletes to consistently create the optimal mental and emotional state for performance,\u201d he says. \u201cThis may include working on emotional regulation, concentration, anxiety, confidence, resilience and team dynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n

These attributes, he adds, \u201care valuable and transferrable to a wide variety of other contexts and can serve athletes well as they transition out of sport.\u201d<\/p>\n

For some athletes, the post-Olympics career path is linear, remaining in the sports industry by taking on roles as commentators or analysts, or moving into coaching, for instance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere’s a lot of athletes who just love their sports so much because they’ve invested 10 to 20 years of their life on this one thing that they know so much about. It’s hard for them to leave it completely,\u201d says Michael Naraine, Associate Professor of Sport Management.<\/p>\n

Other athletes may have a more entrepreneurial mindset, he says, leveraging their Olympic glory into sponsorship deals or moving into consulting or development roles. Some look to careers entirely unrelated to sport, with reports showing that people with sport backgrounds<\/a> \u2014 women, in particular \u2014 are likely to find success in leadership or management-type positions.<\/p>\n

Wright says while most athletes already have the soft skills needed for success \u2014 communication, high emotional intelligence, teamwork and the ability to accept change \u2014 obtaining \u201chard skill currencies\u201d and business-specific, marketable skills is what helps them successfully launch a new career.<\/p>\n

\u201cAthletes are good at identifying what the next goal is, so the question is how do we, as educators, create that next step for them and help them take the skills they have developed into the workplace,\u201d Wright says. \u201cMany elite athletes will have a university degree \u2014 as most will have come through a university environment in Canada or the United States \u2014 so it\u2019s then a matter of legitimizing all of their skills and translating that into the next practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds that success in business also means being fierce and fearless when it\u2019s needed, without compromising respect for others in the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think sport provides the opportunity to do that, to raise each other to that higher level,\u201d Wright says.<\/p>\n

Athletes also have a breadth of life experience that makes them well-rounded employees, too, Naraine adds.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor companies looking to bring in key diversified staff, they want to look for people who’ve been in the trenches \u2014 and no one’s been in the trenches more than someone who’s put their body and mental capacity to the limit like an athlete,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While some Olympic and Paralympic athletes are rising to glory at the Paris 2024 Games, others will see their careers come to an end when the torch goes out at the closing ceremony.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":94769,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,39,3319,1],"tags":[3592,996,4753,7488,594,8568,4327],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94762"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94762"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94770,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94762\/revisions\/94770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}