How training culture normalizes sport bullying: suffering, obedience, and structural violence in athlete development

Sports bullying is increasingly recognized as a pervasive public health and athlete welfare crisis, yet the micro-level mechanisms that legitimize and sustain it remain underexplored. This study conceptualizes how entrenched “training cultures” normalize structural violence in competitive sports. Positioned as a critical integrative review and an exploratory multiple-case qualitative study, the research utilizes a three-stage thematic analysis. The empirical corpus comprises secondary archival data from two quintessential incidents (the U.S. Maggie Haney case and the Chinese Fu Jiali case), triangulated with primary data from 12 semi-structured interviews with athletes. The findings reveal that the intersection of the “culture of suffering” (enduring hardship) and the “culture of obedience” operates as a “five-fold cultural obscuration mechanism”, encompassing legitimation, normalization, silencing, internalization, and collusion. This mechanism induces severe psychological consequences, including moral disengagement and learned helplessness, coercing athletes to internalize maltreatment as a developmental necessity while fostering systemic bystander silence. By reframing sports bullying from an interpersonal anomaly to a systemic condition sustained by cultural architectures, this paper provides a theoretical scaffolding to delineate rigorous pedagogical training from structural violence. Ultimately, effective governance requires moving beyond reactive punishments toward proactive cultural reconstruction, cognitive restructuring, and multi-level structural accountability.