Project “Sport WHISTLE” is a research project funded by the European Commission (Erasmus+) and designed to develop an evidence-based educational program to promote and facilitate whistleblowing behavior in sport settings. Project “Sport WHISTLE” is governed by an international consortium of expert academics, policy-making and sport organizations from Cyprus, Germany, Greece, France, Italy, Romania, and UK. The project is led by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.
The team of “Sport WHISTLE”, worked together and developed an online educational material to increase awareness, inform, and activate athletes and stakeholders to recognize harmful irregularities in sport, to resist and to report. This tool is easily adapted and used by stakeholders (educators, trainers, policy makers) both within and outside the EU. According to the project’s coordinator Prof. Tsorbatzoudis ‘The Sport WHISTLE is among the first efforts to develop educational material promoting whistleblowing. It is an innovative educational material based on evidence from the sport people’s opinions and beliefs and addressing the core issues related to whistleblowing such as legislation, procedures, development of positive culture and empowerment of people to blow the whistle’.
The educational material will be officially presented for the first time on the 14th of June at the launch event organized by UNEFS in Bucharest, Romania. The event will integrated into the International Congress of Physical Education, Sports and Kinetotherapy (ICPESK 2018) Education and Sports Science in 21st Century. Following that, similar events will be organized in Cyprus, Germany, Greece, France, Italy, and UK. These events aim to inform the public about the educational material and educate multipliers that will spread the idea of whistleblowing.
Furthermore, the evidence base of the educational material has been presented at the 2018 World Congress of Sociology of Sport (6th of June), Lausanne, Switzerland. Seventy nine sports people from seven countries participated. Coaches, athletes and executives from 17 different sports shared with the Sport WHISTLE team their opinions about whistleblowing and provided valuable information about the content and delivery mode of an educational material promoting whistleblowing.
