The International Olympic Committee’s Safe Sport initiative has developed widely applicable guidelines and toolkits for International Federations and National Olympic Committees to adopt in their implementing policies and procedures. For this global standard to take root in socio-culturally diverse Olympic communities, there needs to be a contextualising phase through which to enable diverse local sport development settings to take in the safeguarding principle, work out details and negotiate with pre-existing institutional arrangements within and beyond sporting matters. The purpose of this project is to provide knowledge for more effective localising strategies of the international standards of safeguarding in sport by focusing on South Korea’s safeguarding journey.
Research context
South Korea serves as a main case because its contextualising phase is experiencing heated social and policy debates. Despite its success at the Olympics with 195 medals won since the new millennium, this Far East country’s highly intensive, performance-driven athlete fostering system has often been criticised for sacrificing athletes’ welfare. Its full-scale support for elite athlete pathways is referred to as ‘productive, yet abusive’ as the institutional priority is placed on performance over athletes’ well-being. Furthermore, the recent government-led initiatives on Human Rights in Sport (by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea) brought about controversies over the effectiveness of the protective measures in place, and the knock-on effects on athletes’ performance and the nation’s place in future Olympic medal tables.
Research foci and methods
The project addresses two contested issues in the country’ Safe Sport policy development:
- Institutional and socio-cultural obstacles to cultivating a safer sporting environment; and
- Perverse effects of safeguarding interventions
This research project adopts a qualitative approach. Fourteen-week fieldwork is conducted in Korea where the Research Team interviews more than 60 people in total from two groups: (1) safeguarding policy developers/providers and (2) the beneficiaries/regulatees of the policies.
Contributions
The findings of this project are expected to contribute to the studies of abuse and safeguarding in sport in several aspects. First, this study’s empirical setting is unique in that most of the previous research has been conducted in Western contexts. Cultural diversity across Olympic communities around the world requires more specific attention to regional particularities. Though this project only focuses on a single country, its literature review and discussion will interpret the results within a wider East Asian context where schools and national educational bureaucracy play a major role in elite athlete development, thus adding an East Asian case study to the literature.
It can be suggested that high-profile international sporting events, such as the Olympics, function as a double-edged sword for emerging countries’ sport development. That is, international events can provide motivation and opportunities for investment in sport development, but simultaneously, put sports organisations under pressure to produce outputs in a short period of time. Within this policy context, the tension between performance and well-being can be built into the institutional arrangements of the elite sport development systems per se, as trade-offs. By focusing on the South Korea case where sport athletes’ sacrifice is justified and often glorified in the name of national prestige, this study shows how Safe Sport can unexpectedly constitute a policy dilemma. In doing so, this project opens a new discussion on the nature of the abuse issues in sport – whether it is a tame problem as has been assumed, or a wicked. Finally, this project highlights that Safe Sport is not a straightforward process of modernising or improving some less advanced relational or organisational practices up to a certain standard. Rather, it is working with the residuals of the past embedded in present institutional contexts. Therefore, developing effective, workable Safe Sport policies requires an in-depth understanding of present institutional contexts where certain preferences, interests, ideas, routines and collective identities might have been deeply entrenched. With the focus on the institutional, socio-cultural conditions of South Korea’s safeguarding campaigns, this project provides several key obstacles and perverse effects that Safe Sport policies and procedures are faced with in any other national contexts. Therefore, we hope the lessons from South Korea’s safeguarding journey could offer useful knowledge for the international Olympic communities to develop a safer sporting environment in their own contexts.
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