THE MAIN TENDENCIES OF SPORTS INFLUENCE ON PERSONALITY
The article is devoted to the issue of influence of high performance sport on the personality. It is noted that many aspects of the problem have insufficiently been clarified, which is manifested, in particular, in the fact that the general assessments of educational potential of sport are now extremely ambiguous, they are of ascertaining nature and without conceptual reasoning. It is shown that the main reason of that is the shortage of the methodology used in the analysis. The resulting character of sports formative effects and their diversity are usually associated with the peculiarities of the circumstances in which the sport is in a particular case, but not with the intrinsic features of the sport itself. It is emphasized that the main factor in the impact of sports on personality is his competitive nature. It is formulated the statement that the in-competition attitude is universal, that it is an essential act of the process of self-identification and self-affirmation. It has been shown that it is self-contradictory: two basic human strivings - individualization and participation - are present and actively interfaced. It is noted that the athletic contest intensifies, actualizes both of these strivings and face a person with the necessity of their complementarity, which creates a very intense moral-psychological situation. The educational potential of sports is related primarily to the fact that it gives the opportunity to develop and improve a person's ability to implement the mentioned correlation. However, it fully takes place only when the athlete can see the profound essence of sport as a social and cultural phenomenon and when he is internally focused on the development of this ability as an important task of his self-realization. The most direct expression of this orientation is the athlete's perception of principle of fair rivalry as the supreme value. Otherwise, there is a tendency for a person to become the subject of one of these strivings, which makes his behavior either actively-aggressive (when his focus on constructive participation in the general case is lost), or passive-infantile (when the need for individualization is weakened). Sport enables a man to greatly enhance his ideological competence, enriches his experience of appropriate behavior in the situation that forms the basis of human existence. However, it happens full-scale only in the situation where a person understands the inner meaning of the sport, and when he asserts this sense in his actions. The question of volitional qualities of the athlete is considered. It is shown that their character is directly defined by the moral and psychological content, which are manifestations of these abilities.