Over Yves Vanden Auweele
Yves Vanden Auweele (°1941) got his doctorate in psychology in 1973 at KU Leuven-university/Belgium. Professor emeritus since 2006 at the same university. He taught courses in general psychology and sports and exercise psychology to physical education students, and the course in sports psychology to students of psychology and sports medicine. In the 1990s he was the first international coordinator of the European Erasmus program ‘Masters in Exercise and Sport Psychology’ and was a member of the Executive Board of the European Sport Psychology Association (FEPSAC) for 8 years.
He published research on exercise psychology in adults, counselling of elite athletes, on stress and abuse in competitive sports, and on sport and development cooperation. From 2002 to 2014, he worked on a University Sport and Development project at the University of the Western Cape in Belle-Ville near Cape Town, South Africa. He writes opinion articles focusing on the pedagogical, psychological and ethical implications of current practices in sport.
In 2004, Panathlon’s “Declaration on Ethics in Youth Sports” has been issued; the declaration was quickly endorsed by international, national and regional sports organizations. In Flanders, successive Ministers of Sport took initiatives to embed its essentials in the decree on ‘Ethically Responsible Sports’ and to give the International Centre of Ethics in Sport (I.C.E.S.) the assignment to provide ethical advice and design practical manuals for sports clubs. In my optimism, I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. However, it is enough to follow the media for a while to see that this light is all too often obstructed by yet another scandal, incident, abuse, unfair and unsportsmanlike conduct.
