The video of champions, on its own, left them less sure

The girls were still in sport. Arijita Dutta, Poulomi Roy, and Sharmistha Banerjee took 508 of them, in five Indian states, and showed some of them a video of well-known women athletes. On its own, the video left that group less motivated. When a plain account of other jobs in sport was added, those girls were more sure they would still be playing in five years.

Dutta and Banerjee are at the University of Calcutta, and Roy is at Shyama Prasad College in Kolkata. The National Commission for Women in New Delhi paid for the experiment. The Journal of Sport and Social Issues published it in June 2026. The commission kept the data, the full paper is behind a fee, and the five states are not named.

They started with a survey. Then one group watched the video, which the authors describe as the struggles and the achievements of prominent women athletes. The authors do not name them. A second group watched the same video and was given a structured account of other jobs in sport. A third group got nothing. Afterward, all three answered again.

The video-only result is the one the authors call unintended. They were trying to keep girls in sport, and that group came away less motivated. The group that also received the jobs account showed what the authors call a significant increase in the wish to keep playing over the next five years. Neither change comes with a number. The second survey recorded what the girls said they would do. It did not follow them to see who was still playing five years later.

The jobs account is there because of the prize the authors think these girls are playing for. Play at a high level, and a government post reserved for athletes may open. Those posts are scarce. While she is chasing one, she is also expected to meet an older standard of how a woman should look and act. The video shows women who have already managed both. The other information is a second future: work in the sport that is still there if she never becomes the woman on the screen.

A 1997 study by Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda, which this paper cites, found that a superstar can leave people more hopeful when the success looks reachable, and less hopeful when it looks out of reach. Dutta, Roy, and Banerjee did not test whether the video failed for that reason. They compared the video, the video plus the jobs, and a group that saw neither. Only the group given the jobs account reported a stronger wish to stay.

They spoke with girls as well. What those girls said is not in the public summary. Their advice to training centers, the ones near the top and the ones in the middle, is to tell athletes about those other jobs as a regular thing, so more of them stay.

She is still showing up, and she has already been shown a champion. What the experiment changed was whether anyone also told her how a person stays close to the sport without becoming one.