Athlete Welfare, Stakeholder Responsibility and Ethics of Care in Elite Sport: An Examination of Para-sport Organisation Approaches in France

Many professional sport organisations have worked to ensure members are ‘appropriately’ equipped for their sporting careers and lives beyond. Such entities have educational programmes, mentorship schemes, networking opportunities, and support services offering career and professional development opportunities. The range of schemes provides a potentially rich resource for athletes and a degree of comfort and security during their sporting careers. While establishing sector standards and templates, sport organisations’ efforts have also been contoured by external forces and cultural shifts that have raised industry expectations regarding how businesses operate for their employees and improve their commitments to their members. To these ends, agendas to equip athletes appear altruistic and morally sensible. In this chapter, we converse with Arnaud Litou, the High Performance Manager within the National Institute of Sport, Expertise, and Performance’s (INSEP) Paralympic progamme. Arnaud articulates key concerns about the provision of athlete welfare within the French sport system, and raises issues that resonate across the wider professional sport sector. To understand the complexity of Arnaud’s position, we utilise stakeholder and ethics of care theories. We argue that while notions of social welfare and an ethics of care may characterise welfare initiatives, incongruence with sports workers’ social realities may work against their uptake and effectiveness.