Athlete Career Transition: New sports integrity course expands academic opportunities for Olympians

When Olympic refugee boxer Eldric Sella Rodríguez enrolled in the Athlete Career Transition Course in Sport Ethics and Integrity (ACTSI) in 2025, he said the fear he felt was palpable.

“It’s easier for me to get into a ring and fight another man than it is to sit down in a classroom with a pen,” admitted the Venezuelan-born fighter.

A member of the IOC Refugee Olympic Team at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, the 29-year-old devoted 18 years to his sport before concluding: “I have to be more than just a boxer. I have more capabilities than just throwing punches.”

Equipped with only a high-school diploma, however, Sella soon discovered that his post-athletic options were limited. Like many Olympians who remain laser-focused on their sports while chasing their athletic dreams, secondary pursuits such as higher education can often take a backseat.

To help bridge this gap, Olympic Solidarity turned to Professors Michael McNamee and Thomas Könecke at the 600-year-old KU Leuven, the oldest and largest University in Belgium and the Low Countries. Their mission was to create a starters’ course in integrity education that would widen the pipeline for Olympians looking to improve their career prospects with an academic foothold.

The result was ACTSI, a four-week hybrid course (one week online and three weeks on campus) modelled after the university’s prestigious Master’s in Ethics and Integrity (MAiSI). Launched at the conclusion of the Olympic Games Paris 2024, ACTSI teaches ethics, philosophy, law and social science as they relate to sport, with a practical focus on topics ranging from anti-doping and good governance to safe sport and competition manipulation.

“The course provides students with the skills they need to become ambassadors for sport in their own countries,” explained ACTSI alumna Victoire Pauline L’or Ngon Ntame, who represented Cameroon in volleyball at the Rio 20216 Olympic Games. “And it broadens the academic background of those who wish to pursue further studies in the field of sports, specifically clean sport and athlete advocacy.”

The second edition of ACTSI ran from 18 August to 12 September 2025. Sella and Ntame were two of 17 Olympians to make up the second cohort. Collectively, this group of students represented 10 different editions of the Games and countries as diverse as Burundi and Trinidad and Tobago.

Crucially, the course places a higher weight on the future potential of each applicant than on prerequisites such as bachelor’s degrees and near-native English fluency – stumbling blocks many Olympians encounter at the beginning of their career transitions.

“We want people who are passionate about sport, who we can give tools to that are going to go back to their country and make a difference,” said McNamee, who was also the architect behind the Master's in Sports Ethics and Integrity (MAiSI) programme in 2015. “In some of the smaller nations, it’s likely [that our students] will be the only ones with an education in sports integrity in the whole country.”

Triathlete Jean Gael Laurent L’entete of Mauritius is one such student. The Paris 2024 Olympian, who had already earned a bachelor’s degree before joining the ACTSI programme, is now pursuing his master’s on the MAiSI programme.

L’entete describes himself as “one of the rare athletes in Mauritius who has the opportunity of going very high in sport but also has an academic background.” His goal now is to pay it forward. “My aim is to help establish an integrity section in Mauritius,” he said. “When you are an emerging country, governance can go in all directions if you don’t have proper guidelines. I want to bring this aspect to my country as a first step.”

Refugee athlete Sella is also back in education. He overcame his initial nerves to excel on ACTSI, becoming a model student who impressed both classmates and teachers. In the process, it also radically changed Sella’s perspective on academia. “This course gave me the opportunity to make peace with studies,” he said. “It changed my whole view about going to university.”

Encouraged by Professors McNamee and Könecke, Sella is actively looking for ways to obtain a bachelor’s degree, possibly in Business Administration. He is currently working towards an International Sports Management certificate through the University of London.

“If you asked me at the beginning of this year if I was going to be thinking about a bachelor’s degree, I would have told you that you were crazy,” Sella said. “But now I’m thinking about getting into a classroom again for four years!”