Addicted to High Performance Sports – A Rational Behavior?

Abstract

Many athletes invest a tremendous amount of their time practicing sports in order to succeed in sporting competitions of high performance sports. This paper examines the question whether they can be described as addicts, whose behavior is instrumentally rational. In order to answer this question, the paper reviews the existing empirical evidence on rational addiction models and applies the core characteristics of consumption dependency of Becker and Murphy’s model. The data were collected with a whole-population survey (in a cross-section design), adressed to athletes who were members of one of the 31 participating (out of 33 existing) Austrian national governing bodies. The results show that 19% of these athletes can be described as rational addicts. Compared to the relative proportion of maximally nationally successful elite addicts, the relative proportion of internationally successful elite addicts who have not started their training among other internationally successful elite addicts before they turned 10 years old proves to be significantly higher (p=.039, n=34). Based on this first-time attempt to use the core assumption of intertemporal consumption dependency of the rational addiction theory for high performance sports, we argue that athletes can, in part, be described as rational addicts. Within the production network of sporting success several forms of individual instrumental rationalities seem to occur, which should further encourage a discussion on how these rationalities are balanced or maybe rationalized within the network. The results emphasize the necessity of expanding existing evaluations of high performance systems in the field of sport.