Author(s): THIBODEAU, D., SABISTON, C., ATKINSON, M., Institution: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, Country: CANADA, Abstract-ID: 2370

Elite athletes face numerous, pervasive, and ongoing pressures regarding their bodies’ weight, shape, and performance. Due to the body-focused, judgement-based, and highly critical nature of sport cultures, body surveillance and dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and associated negative body emotions (e.g., shame, guilt) are common among elite athletes in a variety of sports. Negative body image, in particular, poses risks to athletes’ abilities to focus on competition and perform to the best of their abilities. When attention is biased towards the body, athlete focus is diverted away from sport performance. Given the prevalence of negative thoughts, perceptions, behaviors, and emotions about the body in sport, it is important to understand the ways in which body image affects athletes’ attention. Eight elite athletes (Mage = 26.25 years, n = 2 cisgender men, n = 6 cisgender women) were interviewed for this qualitative description study to describe the perceived association between body image and attention. Following an inductive qualitative content analysis, three dominant themes were explored. Theme 1, “Who’s the leanest person here?”: the pressures of how athletes feel they ought to appear, reflects the effect of incessant body comparisons among other athlete bodies, the intense vulnerability felt in uniforms which distracts from sport, and the effects on athletes’ attention from being watched, photographed, and recorded. Theme 2, “It’s not only a safety hazard, but you’re not going to perform your best”: athletes focus on sport not their bodies, refers to the participants taking control of their attention through body image and sport where they can, as well as the consequences to attention from pressures related to eating and weight. Theme 3, “I just flung that over my head, that’s incredible!”: the supports of body image and attention, is comprised of the strategies utilized by participants to improve their body image and attention in sport, as well as the value of having positive experiences with coaches on their abilities to focus. The findings of this research provide a detailed description of the perceived association between body image and elite athletes’ control of attention in sport. In addition to discussion of the detrimental effects of negative body image on attention in the context of sport, participants also described strategies undertaken to manage their attention and body image to deter performance detriments. This research contributes to the literature concerned with maximizing sport performance and the attentional repercussions of well-established body image concerns which are pervasive in elite athletics.