The development of talent has become an important issue in the present era of globalisation. With a growing economic interest in the fields of especially sports and education, European and national policies focus on initiatives that make it possible for young people to perform and improve both their personal and their country’s position in the global market of these increasingly competitive areas.

In Denmark the national elite sport organisation in 2009 made talented athletes aged between the age of 14 and 18 a target area in the pursuit of highly specialized athletes able to compete internationally. As the elite sport organisation is obliged by law to secure that talent development happens in a socially responsible way, it has initiated a programme according to which a number of lower secondary schools have set up sport classes aimed at talented athletes in grade 7-9 (pupils aged 14-16). The programme has the objective of creating better opportunities for balancing the demands of early athletic specialization and comprehensive school education. Thus, according to the law young athletes should be given opportunities to pursue versatile social, psychological, and physical skills to develop into social beings that are able to juggle between sports and education in an active career.

The new educational programme offers the talented athletes a more flexible schedule by attending the special sports classes. But to attend these classes the young athletes must apply and pass a sport specific entrance examination held by representatives of the regional elite programmes and sports organisations, and to maintain a place in the sport classes they must continue and perform well in an active career during Grade 7 and 8. If they discontinue their active career, i.e. due to lack of interest or forced by an injury, they may be asked to change school, because otherwise they are keeping other talented athletes from attending these classes.

The above practice poses a dilemma and opens up for the question, how do the young people in the sports classes cope with the pressure of performing well in the highly competitive field of elite sport as well as developing versatile skills in education? This question is the focus of an ethnographic study, which inspired by an American study aims to catch the talented athletes in the routines of their daily life, “to reveal taken-for-granted aspects of their experience, and to make the background foreground” (Lareau, 2011, p. 330). Further, the study draws on concepts and approach of Pierre Bourdieu in order to understand what it means to be perceived as talented and to form identities as an elite sports class student.

Lareau, A. 2011. Unequal Childhoods. Class, Race, and Family Life. second edition. University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. 1997. The Forms of Capital. In: Halsey et al. (ed.): Education: Culture, Economy, Society. Oxford University Press.