Sport intensif à l’adolescence : L’apprentissage de la douleur

Summary

The aim of this study is to investigate how adolescent athletes involved in intensive sport experience pain. The main objective is to describe how physical and moral pain is defined, evaluated, legitimized and sometimes valorized in sport. The adolescent athlete, whose social integration is still fragile and whose future uncertain, must learn to live with and sometimes in spite of pain, in a context where surpassing oneself and one's limits is often presented as a condition for success. With this in mind, this project aims to identify how pain - sometimes chronic - is the subject of care practices in several social spheres. The relationship with pain, its management and the way in which the adolescent athlete is cared for, and his or her lifestyle, is not just a matter for sports medicine and its expertise: the family, the athlete's entourage and a certain number of medical practitioners are also involved in the sometimes negotiated management of pain, and in the ongoing redefinition of the relationship between sport and health. We hypothesize that doping can be understood also in terms of pain rather than only performance. Indeed, we believe that doping practices and addictive behaviors may have their origins in care practices and the chronic management of the physical and moral pain felt by athletes.

Methodology
This research is based on semi-structured interviews (20) with young athletes, and on an anonymous self-administered questionnaire administered to young athletes (300 adolescents, mostly aged 12 to 17) whose sporting activities lead them to come twice a year for a complete health check-up in a sports medicine department of a public hospital. At the same time, the self-administered questionnaire will be administered to another 300 young athletes, with similar socio-demographic profiles, but attending a different hospital site and a different medical unit, to broaden and strengthen the study.

Results
The experience of chronic pain in athletes can lead to heavy use of "legal pharmaceuticals" which can be overlooked as a risk, leading to doping. The market for analgesic drugs tends to intersect with that for doping products, so that the two sometimes have blurred boundaries. Drug use can be a kind of legal doping.  The worrying increase in the use of analgesics among teenagers could expose them to a higher risk of opiate abuse, and constitute a kind of pre-doping exercise. 

Related Publications

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La consommation d'antalgiques chez les adolescents sportifs : une étude exploratoire

The summary and final report are currently available in French only.