Sport career transition : stories of elite Indigenous Australian sportsmen

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Business.International research into sport career transition (SCT) has consistently found that life after sport is fraught with uncertainty for elite athletes. Planning for post-sport careers is therefore most important, something that progressive sporting bodies have begun to realise in recent years. Within the sport industry, SCT programs have emerged to provide frameworks through which athletes plan for retirement, and pathways by which to transition out of sport into a new career and lifestyle. The thesis focuses on a key problem within the SCT paradigm: that it has been presumed that an end to elite sport requires a process of adjustment that is common to all players. That rather narrow perspective fails to acknowledge the situational complexity and socio-cultural diversity of elite athletes, a population group with varied personal circumstances, and thus arguably different individual SCT needs. In developing that argument, this thesis focuses on an athlete group that does not fit ‘mainstream’ participation in elite sport, nor the ‘conventional’ SCT policy milieu. The context is Australian sport, and the focus is with a small but significant number of Indigenous athletes who, notwithstanding substantial socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural obstacles, have contributed significantly to elite-level Australian sport. While many Indigenous Australians have assumed high profile careers in sport, little is known about their transition to a life after sport, or their experiences of retirement. To address this research gap, the thesis explores the SCT experiences of 30 current and former male Indigenous athletes from three sports: Australian Rules football (i.e., AFL), rugby league (i.e., NRL), as well as professional and amateur boxing. The inquiry uses an interpretive phenomenological methodology, and draws inspiration from a Bourdieuian conceptual framework. In depth, face-to-face interviews featuring open ended questions facilitate story-telling and narrative data collection: there is a strong emphasis on giving voice to the participants. Subsequently, Bourdieu’s sociological theories of habitus, capital, and field, provide an interpretive lens around which to frame and analyse the interview responses. The thesis concludes that although elite sport provides Indigenous Australian athletes with many opportunities for a secure life beyond sport, these athletes remain vulnerable and at risk due to: 1) the primacy of Indigenous athletic identity; 2) assumptions about their ‘natural’ acumen as athletes; 3) the perpetuation of racialised beliefs and behaviours; 4) the sense of Indigenous responsibility for, and commitment to, extended families and traditional community networks, and 5) a perceived Indigenous invisibility that tends to reduce the range career choices thought available to Indigenous athletes after sport. Indigenous AFL footballers, rugby league players and boxers have needs that will continue to evolve over time. Sport managers need to recognise this changing environment, their responsibilities to the professional development of athletes, and the needs and perspectives of Indigenous sportsmen playing elite-level sport. The thesis provides an understanding of this situation, by giving voice to stakeholders, who demonstrate that Indigenous athletes experience SCT in complex and unique ways

Lords of the square ring: Future capital and career transition issues for elite indigenous Australian boxers

In Australia a serious and widely documented statistical gap exists between the socio-economic circumstances of the countrys Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Areas of divergence include life expectancy, health, housing, income, and educational opportunity and employment. This has made career attainment problematic for most Aboriginal people. Among male Indigenous people, professional sport is portrayed as one of the few realms in which they can prosper. This is particularly true in the major football codes Australian Rules and rugby league and a feature of elite-level boxing, where Indigenous fighters are also statistically over-represented. However, while sport has provided opportunities for a small number of talented Indigenous athletes, it has rarely been a pathway to lifelong prosperity. This paper contends that as a result of over-reliance on an abundant bank of physical capital, Indigenous Australian boxers are particularly vulnerable to potential occupational obsolescence should their bodily assets erode more quickly than envisaged. Drawing on an Indigenous concept, Dadirri, to inform a wider interpretive phenomenological approach, the paper examines retirement experiences of fourteen elite male Indigenous Australian boxers; the goal of this research is to understand their post-sport career decision making. In this respect, Pierre Bourdieus concepts of habitus, capital and field are utilised to frame and interpret the capacity of Indigenous boxers to develop sustainable career pathways which we describe as future capital during their time as elite athletes

Natural-Born Athletes? Australian Aboriginal People and the Double-Edged Lure of Professional Sport

In examining race in sport, this book is an essential contribution to debates about sports policy, the role of sport in society, and the globalization/localization of sports policies. In particular, it maps out local, national and international responses within sport to racism, and initiatives within sport to tackle racism in and through sport. The unifying concept through the chapters is a political and intellectual commitment to a critically realist position on racism. This collection, including an international line-up of contributors, assesses anti-racism strategies in the context of practices, policies and challenges. Combining empirical research with more theoretically-framed understandings of policies about and towards racism, this book is more than a set of case studies of different experiences: its goal is to map the dimensions of the challenge to racism in and through sport

Dadirri: Using a Philosophical Approach to Research to Build Trust between a Non-Indigenous Researcher and Indigenous Participants

This article focuses on a philosophical approach employed in a PhD research project that set out to investigate sport career transition (SCT) experiences of elite Indigenous Australian sportsmen. The research was necessary as little is known about the transition of this cohort to a life after sport, or their experiences of retirement. A key problem within the SCT paradigm is a presumption that an end to elite sport requires a process of adjustment that is common to all sportspeople—a rather narrow perspective that fails to acknowledge the situational complexity and socio-cultural diversity of elite athletes. With such a range of personal circumstances, it is reasonable to suppose that athletes from different cultural groups will have different individual SCT needs. The researcher is non-Indigenous and mature aged: she encountered a number of challenges in her efforts to understand Indigenous culture and its important sensitivities, and to build trust with the Indigenous male participants she interviewed. An Indigenous philosophy known as Dadirri, which emphasises deep and respectful listening, guided the development of the research design and methodology. Consistent with previous studies conducted by non-Indigenous researchers, an open-ended and conversational approach to interviewing Indigenous respondents was developed. The objective was for the voices of the athletes to be heard, allowing the collection of rich data based on the participants’ perspectives about SCT. An overview of the findings is presented, illustrating that Indigenous athletes experience SCT in complex and distinctive ways. The article provides a model for non-Indigenous researchers to conduct qualitative research with Indigenous people

How insects survive the cold: molecular mechanisms - a review

Insects vary considerably in their ability to survive low temperatures. The tractability of these organisms to experimentation has lead to considerable physiology-based work investigating both the variability between species and the actual mechanisms themselves. This has highlighted a range of strategies including freeze tolerance, freeze avoidance, protective dehydration and rapid cold hardening, which are often associated with the production of specific chemicals such as antifreezes and polyol cryoprotectants. But we are still far from identifying the critical elements behind over-wintering success and how some species can regularly survive temperatures below -20°C. Molecular biology is the most recent tool to be added to the insect physiologist’s armoury. With the public availability of the genome sequence of model insects such as Drosophila and the production of custom-made molecular resources, such as EST libraries and microarrays, we are now in a position to start dissecting the molecular mechanisms behind some of these well-characterised physiological responses. This review aims to provide a state of the art snapshot of the molecular work currently being conducted into insect cold tolerance and the very interesting preliminary results from such studies, which provide great promise for the future