engleski

Young athletes as a national idols - with what challenges do they have to face?

Athletes' top results are considered the most important factors of promotion and thus of every nation's or country's identification ; elite athletes are most often called 'ambassadors of the country'. Elite athletes enjoy a special status in society, one might even say they are different from regular mortals, while some of them even become 'immortal'. Young people need idols. If idols are looked at from the cultural perspective, a star is somebody offering a personality construct by demonstrating values that individual's project onto themselves. A study of the media image of the biathlete Jakov Fak is not only interesting from the aspect of youth's identification with a sports idol who has been competing for two countries, but also in terms of the globalisation and migration processes that are changing our attitude to a person's national identity and the society as such. This paper with the case of Jakov Fak, a highly successful Croatian/Slovenian athlete in biathlon. He was forced to make his choices of citizenship with the aim of better training conditions and finding ways to attain success. This case allows us to observe how such choice brought questions of identification to the general public.

national identity, young athlete, sports

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