Lesley McKenna

Abstract This research addresses two interconnected problems in contemporary high-performance sport: the cultural tensions arising from the integration of action sports into Olympic systems, and the documented crises of toxic culture, athlete mental health, and coach burnout in traditional high-performance sport. Using adaptive theory methodology (Layder, 2013) grounded in critical realist ontology (North, 2017) and MacIntyrean virtue ethics (2007), the research involved 74 participants – 56 from high-performance action sports (HP AS) and 18 from traditional high-performance sport (HP TS) – contributing 97 interviews across three iterative cycles alongside systematic observations at international snowboard events. HP AS perspectives form the primary evidence base, with HP TS accounts providing comparative context. The central finding is that HP AS operates through a distinct organising principle named as the risk-aesthetic logic, in which risk and aesthetic sensibility combine to structure practice differently from the goal-oriented, rule-governed logic that tends to characterise HP TS. The resulting Risk-Aesthetic Framework identifies four mechanisms operating as two complementary pairs: (M1) inside-out performance and (M2) outside-in viewing explain how excellence is enacted and recognised through embodied, embedded, aesthetically guided engagement and competent witnessing; (M3) epic moments and (M4) creative story-based learning explain how excellence is stabilised in collective memory and transmitted through narrative across time and community. These mechanisms generate the experiences participants call ‘stoke’ – conceptualised as a family of experiential states operating across individual, shared, and collective levels – and support the development of ‘positive insignificance’ a perceptual stance in which recognising personal limits can become a source of humility and openness rather than diminishment. The framework offers practical applications for both research problems, identifying mechanism-aware design features for Olympic integration and suggesting how risk-aesthetic sensibilities and experiences – found to exist in HP TS but often suppressed by institutional conditions – might address problems of athlete and coach mental health and cultural breakdown. The research extends MacIntyrean (2007) ethics into embodied, high-risk sporting contexts, contributing to sustainable approaches to high-performance sport in which competitive excellence and human flourishing are understood as complementary aims. Keywords: action sports, risk-aesthetic logic, virtue ethics, critical realism, high-performance sport, stoke, shared stoke, human flourishing, adaptive theory.

At the 13th ICCE Global Coach Conference North et al. (2021), through the Centre for Sport Coaching (CfSC), at Leeds Beckett University, introduced an emerging body of work on ethical coaching practice using a multi-dimensional framework. Two years on, the work has extended significantly in terms of the concepts utilised, the data collected, the number of practical engagements, and the number of staff, students, and partners, involved. Although social and cultural structures were always an important part of the initial multi-dimensional framework (North, 2017), we found it conceptually, practically, and presentationally valuable to extend the initial focus on practice (coaching practice, ethical practice) to a more explicit cultural rendering. Social and cultural structures provide the site, and media (‘the air we breathe’), for ideas about, and practical engagements in, effectiveness and ethicality. A socio-cultural rendering helps to correct – at least presentationally – any misconceptions that effectiveness and ethicality are problems just for individuals, or organisations, outside broader system structures. This presentation, the first of four CfSC presentations on culture and ethics, will explore/assimilate appreciatively and critically existing conceptual and data driven work, existing cultural and ethical tools to provide a platform for an emerging practically orientated framework to understand coaching and ethics.