The Trap of Devotion: Why Athletes Stay in Systems That Harm Them

There's a question that hovers around every story of athletic exploitation—whether it's emotional abuse from coaches, labor practices that border on indentured servitude, or training environments that systematically destroy bodies and minds. The question is always some variation of: why didn't they just leave? It's posed with genuine confusion, sometimes with judgment, as though staying in a harmful system represents a failure of self-preservation or common sense. What this question misses, what it can't quite grasp from the outside, is how powerful the psychological mechanisms are that keep athletes locked in place, even when the costs become unbearable.

The research on why athletes remain in exploitative systems reveals a constellation of interacting forces, each one reinforcing the others until exit becomes not just difficult but psychologically unthinkable (Muhonen et al., 2024; Taylor et al., 2023; Roberts et al., 2020). At the center sits athletic identity—the degree to which an athlete's sense of self and self-worth is tied to being an athlete. When that identity is strong, which it often is for elite or highly committed athletes, tolerating exploitation becomes almost a logical extension of protecting the self (Muhonen et al., 2024; Taylor et al., 2023). Challenging the system means risking not just a career but one's fundamental understanding of who they are.

Athletic identity operates as both motivator and trap. It drives the commitment and persistence that athletic excellence requires, but it also creates profound vulnerability to exploitation. Athletes whose self-worth is deeply entangled with their athletic identity tend to normalize harmful behaviors, to internalize sport norms that privilege performance over wellbeing—phrases like "push through pain" or "sacrifice for success" become not just slogans but organizing principles for life (Muhonen et al., 2024; Taylor et al., 2023). When abuse or exploitation occurs within this framework, it gets categorized as part of what success requires rather than as something aberrant that should be challenged or escaped.

The identity foreclosure piece here is particularly insidious. Athletes who've developed a narrow, exclusively athletic sense of self find disclosure of abuse or leaving the system especially threatening because their primary self-concept is at stake (Muhonen et al., 2024). If you're not an athlete, what are you? The question feels existential rather than practical, and the answer—or lack thereof—becomes a powerful deterrent to action. Better to endure what you know, even if it's harmful, than to risk losing the only version of yourself that feels coherent and valuable.

Socialization layers another dimension onto this dynamic. Athletes aren't just individuals making choices in isolation—they're embedded in environments where exploitative practices are systematically normalized and often glorified as necessary for success (Muhonen et al., 2024; Roberts et al., 2020). When you observe peers accepting harmful treatment, when authority figures justify it as character-building or essential to reaching the next level, when media narratives celebrate athletes who suffered through abuse and emerged victorious, resistance starts to feel not just risky but deviant. The social proof is overwhelming: everyone else is tolerating this, so maybe the problem isn't the system but your inability to handle it.

The "winning at all costs" culture amplifies this normalization process. It's not subtle—coaches, organizations, and the broader sport ecosystem explicitly reinforce the idea that anything in service of victory is justified (Muhonen et al., 2024; Roberts et al., 2020; Taylor et al., 2023). Pain becomes pride. Sacrifice becomes evidence of commitment. The line between dedication and exploitation blurs until it's effectively invisible, and athletes who might otherwise question harmful practices convince themselves—or are convinced by others—that this is simply what excellence requires. The exploitation gets reframed as opportunity, and enduring it becomes proof of worthiness rather than evidence of systemic dysfunction.

Power imbalances make leaving even harder. The relationship between athletes and coaches or organizations is rarely one of equals, and that asymmetry creates dependency that's difficult to escape (Taylor et al., 2023; Roberts et al., 2020; Van Rheenen, 2013). Athletes worry—often with good reason—about deselection, loss of scholarships, career derailment if they speak out or attempt to leave. When you're young, when your financial situation is precarious, when you lack obvious career alternatives outside sport, those fears aren't irrational or paranoid. They're accurate assessments of how power operates in environments where athletes have little leverage and those in authority face minimal accountability.

This dynamic intensifies in underfunded sports or highly competitive environments where roster spots are scarce and athletes are functionally replaceable. The implicit message becomes clear: if you won't tolerate these conditions, someone else will. Complain about training methods or abusive treatment, and you're not principled—you're weak, uncommitted, a problem. The threat doesn't even need to be explicit. Athletes internalize it, police their own behavior and boundaries, and stay silent not because they accept the exploitation as legitimate but because they've accurately calculated that speaking up carries consequences they can't afford.

Hope functions as perhaps the cruelest mechanism for maintaining participation in exploitative systems. Athletes endure present harm in expectation of future rewards—professional contracts, recognition, personal fulfillment, the validation that all the sacrifice meant something (Taylor et al., 2023; Van Rheenen, 2013). Their passion and commitment, qualities that in healthier contexts would be admirable, get co-opted and weaponized. The exploitation becomes reframed as investment, suffering as down payment on eventual success. And because rewards do occasionally materialize—some athletes do make it, do achieve what they've been chasing—the hope never fully dies even as the costs accumulate.

There's a particular psychological trap in deferred reward structures. The logic becomes: if you leave now, everything you've already endured was for nothing. The sunk cost fallacy operates at emotional rather than just economic levels. Athletes reason that they've already sacrificed relationships, education, physical health, mental wellbeing in pursuit of athletic goals, so abandoning those goals would mean rendering all that sacrifice meaningless. Staying becomes about justifying past decisions as much as pursuing future outcomes, and the longer an athlete has endured exploitation, the harder it becomes to walk away.

What makes these mechanisms so powerful is how they interact and reinforce each other. Strong athletic identity makes normalization easier. Normalization reduces perception of power imbalances as problematic. Power imbalances increase dependence on hope for future rewards. Hope justifies continued investment of identity in the athletic role. Each mechanism strengthens the others until the system becomes, from the athlete's perspective, something close to inevitable. Not good, not chosen in any meaningful sense, but inescapable given the constraints—psychological, social, economic—that structure their reality.

The research makes clear that athletes' continued participation in exploitative systems isn't evidence of irrationality or weakness. It's the predictable outcome of powerful psychological mechanisms operating within environments specifically designed—or at least evolved—to extract maximum performance while distributing minimal power or resources to athletes themselves (Muhonen et al., 2024; Taylor et al., 2023; Roberts et al., 2020; Van Rheenen, 2013). Athletes stay because leaving threatens their identity, violates social norms they've been conditioned to accept, risks immediate consequences from those with power over their careers, and forfeits hope that their suffering might eventually yield the rewards they've been promised.

Understanding these mechanisms doesn't excuse the exploitation—if anything, it makes it more morally troubling because it reveals how deliberately systems can be structured to trap vulnerable people. But it does shift the question from "why don't they leave?" to "what would it take to make leaving psychologically possible?" The answer isn't simple. It requires building alternative identities before crisis hits, creating environments where harmful practices aren't normalized, redistributing power so athletes have genuine leverage, and providing support structures that don't require continued athletic participation to access.

Systemic change means more than policy adjustments or educational programs, though those matter. It means fundamentally reimagining how athletic development systems operate, who holds power within them, and what we're willing to accept as the cost of excellence. It means recognizing that athletes' psychological investment in sport—their identity, their socialization, their hope—makes them particularly vulnerable to exploitation, and that vulnerability creates ethical obligations for everyone who benefits from their participation.

The athletes who stay in harmful systems aren't making bad choices. They're making the only choices that feel possible given the psychological terrain they're navigating. Until we change that terrain—until we build systems where leaving exploitation doesn't mean losing your sense of self, where naming harm doesn't end your career, where hope isn't weaponized against wellbeing—we'll keep asking the wrong question and missing the point entirely.

References

Muhonen, J., Stirling, A. E., & Kokkonen, M. (2024). Athletic identity affects prevalence and disclosure of emotional abuse in Finnish athletes. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 6, Article 1406949. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2024.1406949

Roberts, V., Sojo, V., & Grant, F. (2020). Organisational factors and non-accidental violence in sport: A systematic review. Sport Management Review, 23(1), 8–27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.smr.2019.03.001

Taylor, T., O'Brien, W., Toohey, K., & Hanlon, C. (2023). The psychological contract of women athletes in semi-professional team sports. Sport Management Review, 26(1), 111–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/14413523.2023.2243110

Van Rheenen, D. (2013). Exploitation in college sports: Race, revenue, and educational reward. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 48(5), 550–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690212450218