Introduction. This study is a part of the international project „European perspectives on athletic retirement“ (Alfermann, Stambulova, & Zemaityte, in press). It focuses on: a) reasons for sports career termination; b) perceived emotional problems, need for adaptation, and duration of transitional period; c) differences in the process of retirement between athletes who planned and did not plan it in advance.Method. The „Retirement from sport“ questionnaire (Alfermann, Stambulova, & Zemaityte, 2001) was send to retired Swedish athletes by mail, and after considering returned answers 88 subjects were selected for this study on the basis of two criteria: international level athletic career; 1-10 years period after the sports career end. Participants included males (n=57) and females (n=31) – representatives of different individual and team sports.ResultsQuantitative analyses showed that elite Swedish athletes terminated mainly because of sport-related reasons followed by health- and familyrelated reasons. About a half of the subjects (46%) perceived a specific need to adjust to the life after sports, and 24% experienced emotional problems during the transitional period, which lasted 19.0 months (SD=15.7). Several one-way ANOVAs were conducted to identify differences in the process of athletic retirement between two groups of subjects: who planned (67%) and did not plan (33%) retirement. These revealed that athletes who planned retirement were more satisfied with their athletic careers (p< .01) and the timing of retirement (p< .01); they also used „acceptance“ of retirement as a coping strategy more often (p< .01). Athletes who did not plan retirement had more negative emotional reactions on this event (p< .01), and used „denial“ as a coping strategy more often (p< .05).Conclusion. The results will be discussed from the point of view of the Sports Career Transition model (Stambulova, 1997).