Elucidate about the symbol of modern olympic games

With complaints growing louder and several national Olympic committees taking a clear stand by withdrawing from the Games, the unthinkable eventually happened.

The IOC became increasingly criticized for reacting hesitantly to the dramatically evolving pandemic by the international sport community and health experts alike. When the Coronavirus forced the World Health Organization to declare a public health emergency of international concern and categorize the disease as a global pandemic on 11th March 2020 ( WHO, 2020), the world of sport began to wait for a decision on behalf of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) about the Olympic GamesвЂ™ commencement in Tokyo in July 2020. The findings could serve to assist sport psychologists in their applied practice by informing them about athletesвЂ™ and coachesвЂ™ needs in their Olympic preparation during the ongoing pandemic. This study gleans first insights into the idiosyncratic experience of the Olympic Games 2020 postponement among Austrian aspirants. Respondents displayed various coping strategies, such as distancing themselves from sports, cognitive reframing, appealing for acceptance, and planning behavior. Participants associated multiple consequences with the postponement, such as the prolongation of physical and psychological pressure, a lack of motivation, concerns about future performance, living and their occupational career, but also the opportunity for performance improvement and recovery. Many respondents experienced an immediate emotional reaction to the postponement characterized by confusion, disappointment and/or relief. Three general themes comprised of several meaning units of different levels of abstraction were created from the text data.

The results support the notion that the Olympic postponement was experienced in myriad ways by affected participants. In order to infer meaning from the text, a qualitative content analysis with an interpretative focus was conducted inductively, which allowed for deriving alternative explanations of findings. Data was collected by means of short written statements, elicited via open-format questions on an anonymous online survey platform. Five athletes had already qualified for the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020 and 15 athletes were still in an ongoing qualification process. To this end, 21 Austrian athletes (13 male, 8 female mean age = 26.67 В± 4.93 years) and six male coaches were recruited through a criterion-based purposive sampling strategy. This qualitative study examines the subjective perceptions of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games postponement among Austrian Olympic athletes and coaches. Considering the sudden nature of the pandemic, few researchers, if any, have yet scrutinized the individual experience of Olympic aspirants. Accordingly, it has been widely assumed that the thereby caused postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games could have negative psychological impacts for aspirants, since they were halted abruptly in the pursuit of their Olympic endeavors and their daily lives drastically altered. The current COVID-19 pandemic has affected the entire globe, including the world of high-performance sports.

2Department of Sports Sciences, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.

1Department of Sport Science, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany.

Violetta Oblinger-Peters 1* and BjГ¶rn Krenn 2

Elucidate about the symbol of modern olympic games