The purpose of this study was to compare the strategies of coping with stress among elite athletes in Iran national individual sports and also male and female athletes in different age groups. The sampling approach was census reporting and of 340 national athletes in 23 sport fields, 276 athletes (81% of the statistical society) participated in the research. The instrument for the study was a standard questionnaire (cope-revised) specialized for measuring the coping styles with stress in elite athletes. This questionnaire included 40 questions in Likert`s 4 value measurement (from never=1 to always=4), and statistical tests of Friedman, Wilcoxon, Mann- Whitney and Kruscal Wallis were used in significant level of p≤0.05 to analyze the data. The results indicated that athletes used accommodation, approach, self-punishment, self-help and avoidance strategies, respectively. Although, the athletes older than 30 years used approach and self-punishment coping strategies more than other ones, there was no significant difference between athletes according to their experience. Generally, the problem-focused strategy was more prevalent than emotion-focused one among all athletes. Also, the male athletes used emotion-focused style more than female athletes.
