Name: ADRIANO LOPES DE SOUZA

Publication date: 12/08/2020
Advisor:

Name	Role
OTÁVIO GUIMARÃES TAVARES DA SILVA	Advisor *

Examining board:

Name	Role
ANDRÉ DA SILVA MELLO	Internal Examiner *
FLAVIO VALDIR KIRST	External Examiner *
MARIANA ZUANETI MARTINS	Internal Examiner *
OTÁVIO GUIMARÃES TAVARES DA SILVA	Advisor *

Summary: Sport is a worldwide socio-cultural phenomenon, capable of representing the guiding thread of a set of relationships, interactions and valuations established between individuals at different times and contexts. The present notion that sport is an educational tool, is, to a large extent, corollary to the influence of the Olympic Movement, in defining the legitimate forms of its practice and the values we attribute to it. However, Baron Pierre de Coubertin (founder of this Movement) himself pointed out in his writings that sport is not naturally educational, at least not in a socially positive sense, as it needs to be accompanied by pedagogical processes designed to highlight its educational potential, denoting its complex, polysemic and ambivalent character. Bearing in mind that the sporting and cultural phenomenon is not subject to a passive, uncritical and disciplined incorporation of ideologies and values on the part of its practitioners, the present study has as a central objective to understand the educational experience of young elite athletes in the daily life of the Youth Olympics Games in Buenos Aires, focusing on its consequent forms of appropriation and construction of signification through participation in the cultural and educational program offered to it. To this end, this investigation was organized under the canons of a methodological design that articulates the assumptions of systematic review and ethnomethodology, being structured under a corpus that involves three dimensions of data production, namely: 1- Systematic review on the experiences of young elite athletes in the editions prior to the Buenos Aires Youth Olympic Games; 2- direct observation of the intercultural environment related to the Youth Olympic Village in Buenos Aires, systematized in a field diary; 3- Conducting guided interviews with young South American athletes during this mega event. With regard to analytical production, the present study is guided by Certeau's theoretical-methodological contribution in terms of the notions of productive consumption, tactics and strategies and place and space, as well as by the theoretical and methodological assumptions of ethnomethodology. The results underlying the systematic review showed that participation in different editions of the Youth Olympic Games can promote a set of valuable learning for young athletes. However, such educational experiences seem to materialize much more through informal socio-cultural meetings and interactions between them. In the space-time of the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, in turn, the results concerning the observations indicate that
the Youth Olympic Village is a truly intercultural environment, whose daily life is capable of giving rise to a plurality of practices both at the strategic level, from of its structural organization and its programming of cultural and educational activities, as well as in the tactical plan, from the different uses and appropriations of young athletes, which mobilize a set of deviation or resistance tactics and do-it-yourself tactics. The results of the guided interviews, in turn, demonstrate that young athletes build polysemic signification from the productive consumption of the cultural and educational artifacts that were delivered to them, manifesting themselves, especially, from a creative articulation between taste, utility and learning. In addition, although there is a significant part of the reports of young South American athletes and presents itself as the horizon of their networks of practices and signification, the remarkable focus on the sports dimension does not delegitimize the cultural and educational possibilities in the fabric of the daily plot of the Vila . It is concluded, therefore, that the ambivalent scenario linked to the Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires may have as an allegorical manifestation the figure of the athletes themselves, who, at certain moments, can play together, and in others, can be competitors, but, in neither case are they exclusive, since one exists only because of the other.

Keywords: Sport. Competition. Education. Young Olympic athletes. Polysemic signification.

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