Between glory and growth: principals’ perspectives on navigating the dilemma of young athlete cultivation in Chinese sports schools

China’s sports schools have played a pivotal role in cultivating elite athletes and the consequential Olympic triumph for the country. There is, nevertheless, limited investigation of how key managers within this system interpret and manage the issue of the holistic development of young athletes. This study explores how sports school principals interpret and respond to the young athletes’ holistic growth. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 principals. Guided by reflexive thematic analysis, the data were interpreted through Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital, habitus and doxa. The findings indicate that principals’ perspective on the development of young athletes are shaped by the underlying logic of the sports school field, in which competitive performance, academic achievement, and character formation constitute the dominant criteria through which development is recognised and evaluated. They also constructed athletic achievement as a pathway to holistic development, attributing resilience, discipline, responsibility and commitment to intensive training. However, these accounts often treated sport’s developmental benefits as self-evident, while mental health, identity, social relationships, leisure and play received relatively little attention. Principals described academic and career pathways, flexible educational arrangements and character education as means of reducing risks and expanding future opportunities. Although these strategies demonstrated agency, they mainly managed risks within the existing performance pathway rather than challenging its underlying priorities. This study contributes to the literature by demonstrating how field-specific values shape understandings of youth athlete development and by highlighting the need to critically examine which dimensions of development are prioritised and which remain marginalised within elite sport development systems.