1996 Volume 41 Issue 3 Pages 192-206
Although there has been much interest in the phenomena of athletic retirement from high-performance athletic competition, little study into this area has been done. The purpouse of this paper is to explore and describe the experiences of elite athletes who faced to the end of their athletic career and moved to a different stage in their life, from the viewpoint of reconfirmation of ego identity. In this study, personal interviews were conducted with seven former athletes. Trough the interviews, the athletes identified the reasons for their retirement, and reflected on their feelings during and after their athletic career. Through the informations obtained from the interviews, they could be classified into five types, which is composed of two factors, image of retirement from athletics and coping at present. These types are called the statuses of recnfirmation of ego identity, e.g., identity reachivement, related in-field achivement, stagnant defeatism, blind searching, and escapism. The psychological traits of these types are explained through these cases. According to the results, as previous studies have reported, they faced some degree of difficulty in the transition from their athletic career. And as this study proposed, six factors, which this author calls over-identification with sport, life stage pressere, social expectations, future outlook, acceptance of role, and support, interact with each other and influence the transition in each cases.
