The rupture between coaches and athletes is more common than it seems, although it only transcends elite cases. The most recent example is that of Carlos Alcaraz y Juan Carlos Ferrero. These separations occur when several of these conditions are met: individual sport, performance that depends greatly on technical and early specialization, that the relationship began before the athlete became an adult and that it lasts a few years.
Conditions that are met in separations like the very recent one of the fighter Ilia Topuriaand in breakups with the coach and father, such as those of the 1500 meter athletes, the world record holder Jakob Ingebrigtsen (with a complaint of violence) or Jake Wightmanworld champion in 2022; the tennis players separated, although gradually Stefanos Tsitsipas and the sisters Williamsor the golfer Tiger Woods.
A coach-athlete relationship entails an inevitable persistent tension between the need for discipline and control in training and sporting life processes and behaviors and the objective of maximizing the progressive emancipation of the athlete. Nor is it that this situation is exclusive to performance sports, it occurs in life in general, with lesser or greater intensity, between educators or parents with their students.
Along with great classical thinkers, Fernando Savater speaks to the inherent tension between educational conditioning and desirable autonomy. There is no autonomy without guidelines, frameworks and initial norms, that is, freedom is achieved through discipline, when the student or athlete can already, having internalized the norms, transform them by exercising their formed critical autonomy.
The challenge for the coach is how to reinforce the progressive satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence and self-efficacy perceived by the athlete, child, adolescent or early adult, both in training or competitions and in other facets of their life. It is about the difficult, non-linear transition from external regulations imposed by the educator, coach (and/or parent) towards internalized self-regulation (Ryan y Deci2000) of the student, athlete (and/or son).
The controlling traits of a coach-educator involve constant supervision with the imposition of rules and instructions, surely effective in the training of minors, but can become chronic when the athlete has already acquired greater autonomy (Cushion y Jones2006). The iteration of control in the relationship between coach and athlete is reinforced by how its premature establishment was, by the context of demands for sporting performance and by the obligation to achieve results.
These relationships of the coach with a person from their childhood, pre-adolescence or adolescence, to early adulthood, have a lot of adaptive difficulty. There is almost never any culprit, there is no individual failure, it is very difficult to change roles, evolving in and with the relationship, from a necessary great control towards more autonomy and emancipation, is a difficult challenge in life, but much more accelerated and pressured in sport.
Having achieved important sporting objectives and a high competitive status, does the breakdown of the coach-athlete relationship become inevitable?
Professor of Sports Performance Methodology (UDC). She was responsible for athletics at CAR in Sant Cugat and for Women’s Athletics in Spain for the Barcelona ’92 Olympics.