Authors

Sylvain DUFRAISSE¹;  ¹ Nantes université, France

Discussion

This presentation aims at analyzing the insertion of the Soviet sports leaders in the "world of sports". It addresses the evolution of the recruitment of representatives from the USSR in the global sports organizations (International Olympic Committee, federations -IF-, learned societies) during the Cold War. Based on a prosopographic database which contains the biographical data of 196 Soviet sports officials, the communication will analyze in detail the individual trajectories of Soviet delegates. It will portray their social and educational backgrounds, their evolution and the progressive specialization of these 'brokers'. It will shed light on their trajectories in the Soviet Union and in international institutions, from their admission into IFs to the late 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
To achieve this, the method of sequence analysis has been used to describe the patterns of the careers of Soviet sports officials. The sequence analysis is carried out by means of a statistical processing software R project according to the method of optimal matching using longitudinal micro-individual data. Thanks to this tool, each trajectory or career is described by a sequence. These sequences have allowed similar trajectories to emerge and these have been sorted into seven main types of careers.