Trajectory and Transition: Research on the Growth Process of Chinese Elite Athletes

This paper tries to change the traditional research perspectives of emphasizing talent and training factors, and to study the growth trajectory and transition events of Chinese elite athletes from the perspective of sociology. According to the life course theory, this paper constructs a framework to describe the growth trajectory of elite athletes through the event history method, and focuses on explaining three problems: the occur time of transition during the growth trajectory, estimating the possibility of transition, and analyzing the key factors of previous transitions. From a new theoretical framework, this paper derives three issues on the cultivation of competitive sports reserve talents, and the importance and necessity of establishing the growth database of elite athletes is also provided. As a tentative research, it is a new topic of sports science to verify and explain the growth trajectory and important transition of elite athletes through empirical research, and it is also a bright spot of cross-integration between competitive sports science and social science. It has theoretical significance for optimizing the training of competitive reserve talents and improving the training efficiency.