Elite Athletic Career as a Context for Life Design

Journal of Vocational Behavior 88 (2015) 47–55

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Elite athletic career as a context for life design Tatiana V. Ryba a,⁎, Noora J. Ronkainen b, Harri Selänne c a b c

KIHU — Research Institute for Olympic Sports, Jyväskylä, Finland Department of Sport and Physical Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China LIKES — Research Centre for Sport and Health Sciences, Jyväskylä, Finland

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 22 January 2015 Keywords: Career construction Life design Culture Gender Career identity

a b s t r a c t Against a theoretical backdrop of narrative career construction, this article argues for the cultural constitution of life-designing processes in and through sport. A narrative case study approach is used to explore the culturally infused, gendered construction of elite athletic careers from the life story perspective. One Finnish, male, professional hockey player (age 29) and one Baltic, female, amateur orienteer (age 27) participated in a series of three individual interviews, generating approximately five interview hours per athlete. Both participants drew upon the performance narrative plot of an exemplary athletic career to make sense of their sporting experiences, life choices, and career behaviors. Further analysis of gendered career narrations in the context of participants' lives extended contextualized understandings of career practices, discursive resources and cultural constraints of the life design at a particular socio-historical juncture. The present study elucidates the complex social, cultural, and gendered underpinnings of athletic career, as well as the ways in which agentic individuals create novel meanings in bringing authenticity to their life through the athletic pursuit. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction In the past three decades, there has been a substantial growth in the psychological research on athletes' career development, within-career transitions, and athletic retirement, as well as career counseling for athletes. The extant studies examined, for example, the developmental pathways of an athletic career (e.g., Côté, Lidor, & Hackfort, 2009; MacNamara, Button, & Collins, 2010); challenges faced by athletes transitioning from junior to senior sports (e.g., Pummell, Harwood, & Lavallee, 2008; Stambulova, Franck, & Weibull, 2012); transition experiences of retiring/retired athletes and the quality of adaptation to life after sport (for review see Park, Lavallee, & Tod, 2013); and the provision of athletic and postathletic career support services (e.g., North & Lavallee, 2004; Stambulova, 2012). Moreover, while a body of literature on life skills development in sport is also expansive (for review see Gould & Carson, 2008), very few researchers have examined how elite athletes narrate their sporting careers and how those narrations may or may not relate to their lives outside the world of sport. There is a lack of understanding, therefore, of how the elite athletic career serves as a context for mobilizing the life course. This paper is developed against the theoretical backdrop of career construction and the recent rethinking of vocational development as a subjectively meaningful path of designing one's life (e.g., Guichard, Pouyaud, De Calan, & Dumora, 2012; Savickas, 2012; Savickas et al., 2009). Central to our discussion is the notion of a subjective career, which emphasizes individual experiences of the

⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (T.V. Ryba).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2015.02.002 0001-8791/© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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career unfolding (Ellig & Thatchenkery, 1996; Savickas, 2005) and provides the means to think about living authentically in complex ways. It is particularly interesting to examine an athletic career from this perspective as amateur athletes begin to carve out a life trajectory within a sporting context at a young age, regardless of whether this does or does not later converge with their occupational pathways. In the career transitions literature, an athletic career is viewed as a developmental process, which includes career stages and transitions underpinned by the modernist logic of competitive sports (Stambulova, Alfermann, Statler, & Côté, 2009; Wylleman, Alfermann, & Lavallee, 2004). As athletes progress along the athletic developmental continuum, the demands of training, competitions, traveling, resting periods, to name a few, become more intensive and timeconsuming. Adolescent years are the period when athletes transition into elite sport, known as the mastery/investment stage, which can begin from 15 years of age in some sports, although 18–19 years of age is the average (Wylleman et al., 2004). This transition has been reported to be highly stressful for athletes as they adjust to the increased demands associated with training and performance outcomes, as well as new psychological and psychosocial challenges encountered at an elite level, while simultaneously balancing education and social life (Lally & Kerr, 2005; Pummell et al., 2008; Stambulova et al., 2009, 2012). At the mastery stage, which continues until individuals are 28–30 years of age, athletes participate at the highest competitive level, committing a full-time weekly workload to training and competitions. Many amateur athletes consider sport to be a part of their life project, devoting a considerable amount of time and effort in pursuit of an elite athletic career comparable to a professional career. However, very few will reach the professional level required to make a living out of sport, and those who do, rarely accumulate sufficient funds to sustain themselves and their families after retirement from sport (Aquilina, 2013). Because elite careers in sport are relatively short (most elite and professional athletes retire by age 30 to 35) and require persistent, intensive and deliberate investment in developing sport-specific skills, elite athletes tend to prioritize sport over other areas of life. International research findings are comparably consistent in that elite athletes who continue into vocational training and higher education find it extremely challenging to realize their potential in two areas of achievement. They often dedicate their time to developing sporting careers—much to the detriment of their academic pursuits, which would have better prepared them for a post-athletic career (Brandão & Vieira, 2013; Christensen & Sørensen, 2009; Cosh & Tully, 2014). To safeguard the educational and vocational development of athletes, the promotion of athlete “dual careers” in elite sport and education or work begun to receive increased attention in various national and international systems and has been on policy agenda in the European Commission (Henry, 2013). The recent EU guidelines on dual careers of athletes: Recommended policy actions in support of dual careers in high-performance sport (2012) emphasized the importance of mobilizing various policy areas (namely, sport, education, health, employment and finance) to support the provision of dual career training for athletes. A particularly salient risk associated with adolescent athletes' transitioning into high achievement sport is that of identity foreclosure, that is developing a one-dimensional athletic identity due to lack of role experimentation and life experiences outside the sporting contexts. Numerous research studies indeed suggest that athletes' social relationships tend to be enclosed within sport-related events and people (e.g., Lavallee & Robinson, 2007; Miller & Kerr, 2002, 2003; Petitpas, Van Raalte, & Brewer, 2013; Verkooijen, van Hove, & Dik, 2012; Vuolle, 1978). From a developmental cultural psychology perspective that views interaction of an individual with experience as the basis for developmental change (Sameroff, 2009), it is important to consider seriously the effects of athletes' limited opportunities to engage meaningfully in the exploration of social life outside of their sport. In what ways do young people's athletic pursuits shape the field of possibilities in which they design their future? This article examines sporting narratives and practices that create a discursive field of athletic career from which athletes derive the subjective experience. Our specific interest was to analyze how athletic career forms a (sub)cultural context for linking the cognitive with the social in the life-designing process as individuals mobilize their lives through sport. The article is based on two life stories gathered for the research of transnational athletes' career development and transitions in the Nordic region. For the purpose of the current study, both narrative inquiry and a case study approach were used to understand the life-designing process of a Finnish, male, professional hockey player and a Baltic, female, amateur orienteer as they conveyed the relationship between their athletic careers and lives outside of sport. The in-depth case approach was important to avoid suppressing the uniqueness of autobiographical life themes, which were integral to our understanding of participants' meanings and values that were “actively lived and felt” (Williams, 1977, p. 132) in and through the athletic career. While our focus was on examining the meanings ascribed to career events and identity—that is, on the subjective career—we treat them as constructed within the dynamics of social interactions and woven into the historically contingent cultural scripts available in a society. In so doing, we make relational bridges between the psychological and the sociocultural to emphasize that “sociocultural influences hardly stand apart from psychological processes, but instead, are enmeshed in ongoing environment–person relations as constitutive influences at the level of individual experience” (Heft, 2013, p. 14; original emphasis). Consequently, we consider athletes as agentic individuals in their reflexive capacity to navigate social structures and negotiate their life options, without assuming a constructivist location of agency and identity within the autonomous individual (c.f., Agergaard & Ryba, 2014; Cohen, 2006; LaPointe, 2010). The following research questions guided this study: (1) what sporting career narratives and discourse practices were invoked by the athletes to make sense of the athletic career?; and (2) how did gender and (national) culture meanings permeate and direct their career behavior and life choices?

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2. Method To answer the stated research questions and consequently develop a contextualized understanding of the ways participants constructed their life trajectories through elite sports, we analyzed two contrasting career stories from a narrative case study approach. Responding to the call by Savickas et al. (2009) to explicate the nuanced cultural context underlying career construction, we chose the stories of two elite athletes of a similar age, whose careers took shape in a subjectively and objectively different transnational sporting field because of gender (male, female); athletic status (professional, amateur); sport revenue (ice hockey, orienteering); and socio-political historicity (‘old’ vs. ‘new’ Europe). The role of narrative in representing, explaining and understanding career development, life transitions, decision-making, and aspirations for the future has been acknowledged in occupational psychology (Bujold, 2004; Cochran, 1990; Savickas et al., 2009). Bearing in mind that stories are reconstructions of the experiences, analyzing personal narratives may reveal cultural interconnectedness between the unique ways in which people make career decisions and the dominant discourses and narratives that impose coherence on individual experience by means of producing a particular understanding of what careers are and how one is supposed to think, feel and act (Linde, 1993; McLeod, 2006; Stead, 2004). Moreover, recent research in sport psychology has illuminated the benefits of a comparative case study method for gaining a better understanding of athletes' experiences and the ways meanings associated with athletic identity, body, movement and gender are socially and culturally constructed to impact participants' everyday lives (Busanich, McGannon, & Schinke, 2014; Day, Bond, & Smith, 2013). Since case studies often contain extensive narration that captures the complexity and contradictions of lived experiences, the chosen method allowed for retaining the idiosyncratic features of participant stories and examining how multiple storylines were developed simultaneously to form the meaningful link between the athletes' subjective and objective careers (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Yin, 2009). 2.1. Participants The participants of this study were two elite athletes competing at the highest national and international levels at the time of interviews. Tero is a Finnish, 29-year-old male ice hockey player whose athletic career has been unfolding in the Finnish Elite League (SM Liiga), American Hockey League (AHL) and National Hockey League (NHL) in the U.S.A. Tero dropped out from a senior high school at the age of 18 to pursue a professional athletic career. He had a wife and three children. Tero's wife has been a housewife throughout his professional career. Two years prior to the interview, Tero had received a nearly career-ending injury, from which he was recovering and returning to competitive hockey at the time of research. Albeit narrating a rather representative pro-hockey story, Tero offered an insight into the life of a young hopeful, who was given a chance, but who did not make it into the big business of NHL. His career narrative also elucidated the powerful impact of the taken-for-granted pro-hockey discourse practices on family life. Laura is a 27-year-old female orienteer and long-distance runner from a Baltic country. Her athletic career has predominantly remained at the amateur level—with the exception of occasional professional contracts at competitive seasons. She had lived and practiced her sport in two Nordic countries and was living in a cosmopolitan city outside of Europe at the time of interviews. Laura had two university degrees, but did not work in either of her fields of study. She held various unskilled jobs to support her athletic pursuits. She had a boyfriend with whom she was in a long distance relationship. Laura's interviews offered a unique perspective on the dynamic negotiation and reconstruction of post-Soviet cultural metanarratives and career discourses in the transnational field, which were molding her subjective and objective careers into a personally meaningful life trajectory. 2.2. Data collection The data were collected through in-depth narrative interviews from the life story perspective (Atkinson, 1998). Both athletes participated in a series of three interview sessions with each session lasting from 90 min to two hours. A semi-structured interview guide was developed to provide a framework for interviews: the participants were asked to recall childhood experiences, memories of family, friends and school, their career development in (and outside of) sport, memorable achievements, challenging transitions and adaptation experiences in different cultural settings. Participants were encouraged to develop their own preferred order in telling their stories. In the second interview, the participant was given a chronological timeline that was drawn based on the first interview. This was used as a support to invite further reflection on the major events, themes and inconsistencies that emerged during the first interview. Laura and Tero were also asked to locate on the chart and describe in rich detail the most challenging transitions they had experienced in their lives. The third interview focused on exploring the shifting discourses of culture and gender surrounding the meanings attached to (athletic) career, identity, mobility and migration, performance, kinship and family. Finally, the interviewer asked the participants to reflect on important changes in the past, ponder on what they would have done differently given an opportunity, and share plans and aspirations. The elicited life stories showed the complexity of fluid (re)construction of experiences and facilitated our understanding of how athletes navigated the possibilities afforded to them in making crucial career and life choices. 2.3. Data analysis Preliminary analysis of the participants' stories began during the data collection by listening to the previous interview on the tape and making notes of the important themes emerging in the narratives. This preliminary analysis was used to generate probing

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questions for subsequent interviews. All interviews were transcribed verbatim and read through several times by the authors. The first author then conducted a thematic analysis as outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006), where initial comments, codes and memos were developed systematically into broader themes and concise phrases. Tentative connections were sought across themes and small narrative segments, and the inductively developed analysis was then infused with psychological terminology. Finally, a small case report was created to capture the central themes of each participant's narrative. In the next step, the first and second authors worked on the narrative analysis of form, which seeks to discern the narrative structures and central plot that holds the story together (Riessman, 2008). This part of the analysis was holistic, examining the overall organization of the narrative with an aim to tease out the core meanings and structures that bring coherence and continuity to the story (Smith & Sparkes, 2005). Narrative analysis of form also focuses on discerning cultural narratives and discursive resources that have been drawn upon in the construction of personal stories and identities. Comparing Laura and Tero's narratives allowed for additional insights into the ways elite sporting culture intersects with one's sociocultural situatedness to produce varied effects on shaping the career paths. 3. Results and discussion We identified three discourses of athletic career that the participants drew upon to construct their career stories: a performancedriven exemplary career, an integrated dual career in sport and education, and a transnational career. Although these career discourses do not stand apart, but rather are enmeshed within an individual life history, they signify varied psychological processes that are enacted in the living practices over time. The invoked athletic career discourses were construed as the culturally mediated narrative context in which the athletes have been designing their future. Moreover, the narrative context that the globalizing sports industry creates is intricately linked to everyday discourse practices to generate a set of “ready-made and preconstituted ‘experiencings’” (Hall, 1977, p. 322) for how elite athletes (should) live and derive meaning from their sport participation. Consequently, we attended to the continuous psychic flow between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the athlete body in a creative attempt to give unique form to the linguistically mediated experience as it related to athletes' subjective sense of themselves. In the sections that follow, we first present and discuss the performance narrative plot, which provided the dominant structure for participants' stories impacting their experience of themselves and their lives. After that we elaborate on cultural meanings and gendered ways of the life design through the idiosyncratic storylines discerned from Tero and Laura's narrated accounts. 3.1. The performance narrative of an elite athletic career The most noticeable storyline was aligned with what Douglas and Carless (2009) called a performance narrative, defined as “a story of single-minded dedication to sport performance to the exclusion of other areas of life and self” (p. 215). Cultural representations of the exemplary athletic career, success, lifestyle, and athletes themselves are oversaturated with the performance narrative in the interconnected global and local spaces, such as that of mega-sport events and homegrown athletic clubs, resulting in structure(s) of meaning closely linked to athletes' identity, self-concept and mental wellbeing (Busanich et al., 2014; Douglas & Carless, 2006, 2009; Ronkainen, Ryba, & Nesti, 2013). Although Laura and Tero had different motives for initiating a sporting career, they constructed their career identities as that of an athlete and made sense of life projects in connection to athletic development and improvement, personal records and achievements, winning and social recognition. For example, both participants expressed the need for competence and success in sports (measured by racing times or number of goals, national team membership, media and sponsor contracts) as well as receiving external rewards and validation from coaches, peers and spectators. As Laura attested, “it's my inner need to show myself that I am capable to be good in something.” Sport was a cherished context for Laura to satisfy the competence need because she was “talented,” “the fastest girl in the group,” and “it was very easy.” After two years of practicing orienteering (alongside other sports), Laura reached the top junior level at the age of 15: This orienteering…got so big and so fast for me. I've got to go to all these competitions, also in Finland and Sweden, so I was picked to represent [home country]… In orienteering I could see the results for myself. I got first places all the time. So I skipped [other sports] and started to do only orienteering. Similarly, Tero talked about playing different sports growing up and beginning to concentrate on hockey at age 14–15 while leaving soccer as “more like a hobby.” Elaborating on his career choice, Tero stated, “I was doing pretty good in soccer too, but hockey seemed to be more my kind of sport 'cause I'm not much of a runner…and I liked hockey being physical.” Furthermore, Tero played in “every tournament with the Finnish National Team [by age],” dreaming about “playing hockey as a pro-hockey player.” Drawing on Cohen's (2006) use of the discourse concept as “linking interpretation with enactment” (p. 199), the aforementioned excerpts suggest that Laura and Tero derived meanings of orienteering and ice hockey in the social context of elite sport, in which cultural narratives and career practices allowed for coherence in their decision to specialize and professionalize the athletic career. It is important to emphasize that career discourse practices are often predicated on the past success stories that have permeated culture to organize the ways of doing and talking about things with little self-reflection (Richardson, 2012). Therefore, being identified as “talented” and “elite” may become a turning point for the athlete to narrow down the life trajectory in pursuit of an exemplary career path. A professional attitude built on hard work and wholehearted dedication to the sport constitutes the taken-for-granted,

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underlying and mostly unconscious assumption comprising the elite culture, which young athletes learn in the process of sport socialization (Christensen & Sørensen, 2009; Roderick, 2006). Ironically, the cultural practices of athletic career are underpinned by the professionalization of sport, even though many talented athletes who transition into high performance sport will not be able to make a living as elite athletes. Career discourse practices around the integration of education and/or work with sport deserve a particular attention. Both athletes spoke about education in the context of their athletic pursuits, invoking a relatively new “dual career” discourse of combining education (or work) with sport (see EU guidelines on dual careers of athletes: Recommended policy actions in support of dual careers in high-performance sport, 2012). For example, Tero recounted his parents being conscientious about him doing well in school, “from the first class, I went home, did my homework and then I was free to go skating or playing with my friends. So school was first and that what my parents taught me.” Tero had had above average grades in school until he was selected into a professional team in SM Liiga when he was 17 years of age. Tero felt that as a rookie, he had to prove every day that he deserved to be on the team and because “school was no reason to skip the practice,” he was afraid to give the coaches a reason not to play him. He began to skip the morning classes in order to attend the first ice hockey practice, only going to school in the afternoon. It became increasingly difficult for Tero to maintain his academic motivation, as he “wanted to pull all his effort to hockey.” Reflecting retrospectively on his decision making processes, Tero stated: When they took me up to the men's team, and I was among the two other guys who were that young playing in that league, it gave me a picture that this might get me somewhere. Next summer I was drafted in the NHL second round and started thinking even more that this is what I want to do. I want to play all my cards here, try to be as good hockey player I can be and, like, I can do school later. When he discussed the issue with his parents, they were initially “very mad,” insisting that Tero had to finish the school. However, after numerous phone calls and meetings with agents, they “started thinking that maybe [Tero] is a good player, maybe he can be something.” Having been coerced into a pro-hockey dream, Tero's parents “let [him] make the decision.” Tero's contemplation on his choice to drop out of the high school to pursue professional ice hockey exposes the power of elite sport culture to naturalize athletes' desire to focus on training and competition to the extent that “it is impossible for him (or her) to be much else” (Werthner & Orlick, 1986, p. 337). When asked whether he had access to career counseling or dual career support services for talented athletes, Tero indicated that he had none, suggesting further that “the times have changed” and “nowadays the coaches are a bit more understanding about the school…that you can play and be a student at the same time.” Although Tero regretted not completing his secondary education—a feeling that was intensified after his injury—he could not name any occupation or activity he would be interested in pursuing after the pro-hockey career. Tero's passion for hockey persevered through major career disappointments and adversities as he marveled, “In the sport of hockey you get a lot of emotions which you won't gain in any regular job…as soon as you stop feeling anything stepping on the ice, you're done.” The performance narrative and associated sporting practices constitute the taken-for-granted “truth” of elite career development and serve to maintain power structures in the growing sports economy. Under free-market conditions, skills and performance gained a significant currency for upward social mobility within a transnational sporting field, which has wide ranging consequences for athletes' lives (Bale & Maguire, 2013; McGillivray, Fearn, & McIntosh, 2005). Transnational recruitment that draws on social networks and individual agency is a decisive point for developing a transnational athletic career (Agergaard & Ryba, 2014). Both participants were recruited for being promising rising stars and for the potential to capitalize on their talent by an American ice hockey and a Danish orienteering clubs respectively. While research on athletic labor migration in highrevenue professional (men's) sports is extensive (see Bale & Maguire, 2013), less is known about transnational careers of amateur athletes in relation to occupational domains and the life design. In this sense, Laura's case is especially intriguing. Laura was spotted by a Danish coach at a Junior World Orienteering Championship. When she received an invitation to train and work as an au-pair in Denmark, she decided to defer her university studies for one year and relocated within a month. At that point, Laura had no specific career aspirations, confessing “I wasn't thinking I have to become a real athlete or top athlete.” Exposure to an elite sporting culture in Denmark, in which “all the Danes trained very hard,” “knew what they wanted” and “had goals,” initiated a shift in Laura's understanding of her athletic career. Her further involvement in professional orienteering, now in Finland, during three consecutive summers was the crucial turning point for Laura's construction of athletic identity because “then [she] was doing it seriously.” The club offered many training choices for her and “all other stuff so that I could be there just an athlete.” Laura commuted regularly across international borders, organizing her studies through an Erasmus exchange program so she would be able to train in Denmark and Finland, and later returning home to complete her second bachelor's degree with no commitment, nevertheless, to pursue the chosen occupational pathway. Laura's subjective career path was that of a professional athlete, although orienteering did not offer her financial security. In fact, she had to combine sport and studies with work to support herself. However, Laura consistently prioritized her athletic career by choosing “easy jobs” unrelated to her education, which would not distract her focus from training. Laura confirmed that “studying or working is the second…so all things I do in my life is because of the sport… I'm thinking as an athlete. I'm living as an athlete. It has always been like that.” Therefore, during her university years, Laura did not invest in accumulating professional competences and work experiences in relevant fields, leaving her with the feeling that “these study things weren't influencing me that much.” There is considerable research evidence to suggest that athletic identity is a salient aspect of elite athletes' self-concept and that athletes' limited engagement in non-sporting spheres of social life foreclose their identity development (Carless & Douglas, 2009;

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Lavallee & Robinson, 2007). Both narratives revealed how Tero and Laura's identities were tied into the performance narrative meaning system inasmuch as they would question their self-worth when underperforming and lose a sense of belonging and who they are while experiencing an injury. In the athletes' own poignant words: I wanted to see progress in physical development…my self-esteem went down because I couldn't see any progress in my results. (Laura)

When you're injured, you have the feeling that you're not part of the team at all. A lot of my good friends are playing on that team, and I kinda felt so much an outsider of everything…like you don't belong anywhere. It was very hard, very very hard. (Tero) The danger of merging what workers do with who they are has been recently pointed out by Savickas (2012), who advocates for the construction of identity capital in the form of a life story that individuals can invest in to cope with the uncertainties of the job market. This is especially pertinent to elite athletes, who typically have a limited repertoire of discursive resources for assembling their life stories due to early acculturation to the performance driven ethos of modern sports. Hence elite athletes' identities, constructed within the dominant performance narrative, tend to consume their sense of self, jeopardizing coherence and continuity in the life narrative outside of high achievement sports. This analytical insight is pivotal for understanding the life designing process unfolding in the sociocultural space of elite athletic careers and may offer an alternative perspective to career counselors, working with athletes, on the dominant themes of their clients' life stories.

3.2. Culture and gendered meanings of athletes' career behavior We also identified idiosyncratic storylines intertwined with the performance narrative, which formed the historicity of each athlete's life. These highly personal themes add depth to the participants' conflicting accounts about self and career identity, relationships, personal beliefs, as well as about the conveyed emotions and choices they made along their athletic paths. In this section we elaborate further on Tero and Laura's careers in light of the unique storylines and gender dynamics that were shaping the athletes' life trajectories. Both stories were saturated with social expectations and cultural norms, as both Tero and Laura were either living out or resisting the gendered cultural script of good life in their respective societies. While gender equality is recognized in Nordic countries, the residual elements pertinent to gender roles are still active in everyday social interactions and career discourse practices, especially in elite sport contexts (Turpeinen, Jaako, Kankaanpää, & Hakamäki, 2011; Virtanen, 2012). For example, the way athletes talked about their families and the extent their athletic careers were supported and legitimated indicated how gender beliefs deeply permeated and shaped their life choices. Laura stated that her parents never came to her competitions and never discussed her sporting experiences. Although they didn't tell her to quit orienteering, she felt that they didn't approve of her involvement in sports. As a teenager, she received money from her father if medaled; hence, it became another reason for Laura “to do sports more and do well—for the money.” However, as she was approaching her 20s, Laura's family and relatives became more explicit in directing her towards a traditional life script: “graduate from university, go to work, get a family, kids.” “As I'm getting older,” Laura shared, “the pressure of the society—I mean the [Baltic country's] life, the pressure of my family is getting bigger.” Reminiscent of the patriarchal gender dynamics, Laura used orienteering (akin to marriage) as a gateway through which she could escape her family and societal demands in the culturally hybrid transnational field. She confessed that it was easier for her to live abroad, “because then I'm my own boss.” In contrast, Tero's career development was silver-lined with family support, especially from the significant women in his life. He described growing up in a time of economic recession when his working class parents had lost their jobs. Although the family struggled to make ends meet (e.g., “we didn't have many Christmas presents;” “my mum made our clothes”), they supported Tero's participation in ice hockey. He couldn't pinpoint what exactly sparked his sudden passion for hockey at age eight, but vividly remembered how his mum was teaching him to skate on the frozen lake because “I wanted it so badly.” “We practiced, practiced, practiced,” Tero continued, until “I was able to skate and got into a team.” Work ethics, emotional connectedness and strong family support were the meanings and values that constituted this player's authentic life in and through sport. Significantly, the participants' certain experiences, meanings and values, which could not be expressed solely within the performance narrative plot, were nevertheless lived and practiced to perpetuate the elite sport culture (Carless & Douglas, 2013; Williams, 1977). For example, Tero's idiosyncratic storyline, assembled within the hypermasculine narrative context of professional ice hockey, supported his single-minded focus on hockey and performance. At age 20, he embraced the traditional gender role of a breadwinner, stating that it was “natural” for him that Tero's girlfriend (his future wife) migrated with him to the U.S.A. They lived four years in the Northern United States, where he played mostly in AHL in hopes of securing an NHL contract. When asked what his girlfriend was doing during that time, Tero replied: “she just was supporting me there.” At the time of the interview, Tero was the head of his household, with three children attesting that the whole family “is living his hockey life.” His wife took care of the house and children (“For me it's a very big thing to have a nice home-made dinner”), housing and furniture during relocations (“If we have to move, we move for the hockey…she puts all the effort into my hockey”) as well as praying for Tero's success and providing emotional support (“I'd feel weird to play the game if I knew that my wife is not in the stands”). The fact that Tero never had to

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question whether his family would follow him upon job relocation facilitated his career mobility as he felt additional security, allowing him to negotiate new contracts and to avoid clinging to a hockey club located in the place of his family residence. Similarly, while Laura resisted the gendered metanarrative about her life, she actively subjected herself to rigid disciplinary practices to mold her body, lifestyle and career identity to that of the exemplary elite athlete, who “lives for the sport.” The complexity of Laura's inner life was often manifested in providing shifting accounts of her identification with various discourses of gender and sport as well as her attempts to unfix and renegotiate her identity position rooted in certain (post)-Soviet discourses. This was particularly evident in Laura's storyline we coined as “chasing the foreign candy,” which presents a leitmotif of her life narrative. When Laura was a little girl, an international level female orienteer who lived in the same apartment building used to bring Laura “the foreign candies” from her trips abroad. During the Soviet period, Laura explained, “it wasn't so easy to get out of [the country]”, attesting further that she started sport training in a childish hope “to go to Finland and Sweden and get all the candies.” Mobility was a privilege of the few even in the late 1980s, and it would appear that Laura created an implicit association between elite sports and the things “normal people usually do not get.” Although Laura looked up to her famous neighbor, who gradually has become Laura's mentor and career role model, her access to alternative narratives of athletic career and cultural scripts of a good life facilitated Laura's decoding and reconstruction of the cultural meanings in a subjectively unique way. Chasing the foreign candy turned into the transformative process of repositioning herself within the complex and often contradictory discursive field in which Laura was living her life. To sum up, both athletes developed careers in sport characterized by significant personal effort, deliberate training, specialized skills and knowledge, and psychological continuity. While Tero's objective career was haunted by not living up to the privileged success story in professional hockey, he nevertheless found fulfillment and excitement in his work, claiming that he “wouldn't change a day” in his “hockey life.” Laura's enduring athletic pursuits were largely unpaid as orienteering is most commonly taken up as a lifestyle sport. Despite this, sport offered her invaluable access to corporeal and psychosocial mobility within a transnational field and, consequently, a possibility to reinterpret her life. The similarity and diversity of the participants' career pathways elucidated the ways in which social relations and discourse practices surrounding elite athletes serve to give cultural meanings to life designing processes, which vary in space and time. 4. Conclusions Our analysis of professional and non-professional athletic career stories in relation to the narrative context in which sport organizations professionalize careers has indicated that the athletic career can be traced to various discourse practices, such as those rooted in the exemplary career, dual career, and transnational career. These career discourses exist alongside each other while being uniquely reinterpreted in the culturally interconnected space of elite sport. Hence, as Stead (2004) contends, there is not one narrative based on one's culture, but multiple narratives of individual efforts to deconstruct and reconstruct the cultural norms that “dictate us to think of careers in certain ways” (p. 401). While traditional discourse practices in elite sports are implicitly predicated on the professionalization of sport and are powerful in fostering a stage-based (i.e., progressive and hierarchical) development of the career, we suggest that subjective athletic career is embedded in a more comprehensive and fluid discourse about life opportunities. Approaching career as a personally meaningful journey through learning, paid and unpaid work, and relationships embedded in specific historical and cultural events facilitated our understanding of the ways athletes may construct their lives through the sporting social context. In that regard, Laura's story was especially revealing as she chose to be an athlete and study/work rather than develop a professional career. Tero's story was equally informative in challenging the linear career and life progression, as well as contextualizing continuous change in multiple directions (both progressive and regressive) within the life-context. The comparative aspect of our analysis explicated that the life-design is a culturally constituted process, that is, opportunities and meanings undergirding career are constructed and negotiated within a particular socio-political and historical framework. This research contributes to mending the gap between personal experience and the social world by attending to the agentic capacities of individual subjectivity to enact its cultural and social multiplicity. Although this theme has been examined by others positioned in social constructionism (e.g., Cohen, 2006; LaPointe, 2010; Richardson, 1993, 2012), we tread new ground by looking at life design through a cultural theory lens. 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