The aim of this research is to study the relationship between motivational beliefs such as the personal conceptions of abilities, the achievement goals and the self-handicapping strategies in athletes practising individual and team sports. Two hundred sixty two subjects, from both sexes and from medium socio-economic status, were administered The Personal Conceptions of Intelligence Scale (Faria and Fontaine, 1997), a questionnaire on sport goals (Duda and Nicholls, 1992) and a questionnaire on Self-handicapping strategies (Midgley, Arunkumar and Urdan, 1996). The main results evidenced the existence of positive significant correlations between the static conception of abilities, the performance goals and the self-handicapping strategies both in individual and team sports. Moreover the static conception of ability is a predictor of self-handicapping strategies. The results highlight the importance of studying implicit motivational beliefs in the sport domain in order to better understand the use of selfhandicapping strategies.