Abstract

The establishment of the Youth Olympic Games (YOG) can be seen as an attempt by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to revive Pierre de Coubertin’s’ educational mission for the Olympic Movement by combining high performance sport with education of young athletes. This article examines how the participating athletes coped with the educational elements in the high-performance setting of the 2016 YOG. Perspectives from institutional logics theory are adopted in order to examine the athletes’ responses to the competitive logic and the educational logic that they faced. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with forty-seven athletes from thirteen countries practicing fourteen different sports. The findings indicate that all athletes complied with the performance logic; however, the responses to the education logic were diverse and can be characterized as compliance, defiance, and ignorance. While the YOG athletes were expected to combine sport with education, the athletes’ responses to the dual logics during the 2016 can at best be interpreted as compartmentalization.