Life skills from sport: the former elite athlete’s perception

Abstract

This study will explore the learning context and its relationship with life skills in former elite athletes. This was a cross-sectional study where 477 former elite athletes completed an ad-hoc questionnaire. A two factors solution (individual and social life skills) from the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) explained 59.1% of the variance. Athletes that had a higher education at retirement, perceived having higher individual and social life skills. Athletes from team sports and those who trained less than 27 h/week perceived a higher degree of social life skills. Age was related to social life skills, too. Additionally, the higher the monthly salary was, the greater the athletes perceived their individual and social life skills. Sport stakeholders should not only provide athletes specific courses on life skills, but they should also guide them on how to apply those life skills in other spheres of their life after sport.

Keywords:

• Life skills
• retirement
• education
• sport career
• high performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by the Olympic Studies Center of the International Olympic Committee under 2015–2016 Research Advance Grant Program.