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International Review for the Sociology of Sport
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Professional Careers of the German Olympic Athletes

Achim Conzelmann

University of Tübingen, Germany, achim.conzelmann{at}uni-tuebingen.de

Siegfried Nagel

University of Tübingen, Germany, siegfried.nagel{at}uni-tuebingen.de

Successful careers in top-performance sports demand large amounts of time and personal resources and normally they take a course parallel to the period of educational and professional qualification. Regarding careers of former top-performance athletes, the question arises as to how far the engagement in top-performance sports has an influence on the professional career path. This article aims to categorize the professional careers of top-performance athletes and to connect them with the subjective ratings of the respondents. This will be carried out by means of objective life-course data of former Olympic athletes. The theoretical approach is based on recent conceptions of life-course research and of professional socialization research. In a postal inquiry of 616 successful German Olympic athletes (male and female) the sports and professional careers were recorded retrospectively. The results show that former top-performance athletes generally have higher educational qualifications and professional positions than the German population. But as there are big differences with regard to the individual career patterns, a typology of professional careers seems to be practical. For that purpose, a classification typology of professional careers was developed using cluster analysis. The engagement in sports rather favours the professional career in its course.

Key Words: cluster analysis • life course research • professional career • top-performance athletes

International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 38, No. 3, 259-280 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/10126902030383001
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