Background: Exercise has been increasingly linked with influencing gut microbial composition, but exercise-associated functional pathways that are driving this are still unclear. Using shotgun metagenomics data, supplemented with metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs), we aim to identify the functional potential of athlete gut microbes, offering new insights into microbiome-driven adaptation in athletes. Method: The investigation utilises 1057 samples from seven public datasets of athlete gut microbiome studies to examine the functional profiles in five different sport categories, including cricket, cycling, hockey, rugby, and running. Functional profiles were assigned through HUMAnN and MAGs were generated through use of MetaWRAP. Results: Functional investigation revealed exercise-specific microbiome patterns, along with their associated pathways, across a variety of sports.  Diversity analysis indicates runners differ significantly from cricketers and cyclists. Runners were enriched for pathways consistent with energy metabolism, specifically glycogen degradation and carbohydrate fermentation. Hockey players were enriched in glycogen turnover and pyruvate fermentation pathways, while cycling and rugby groups shared enrichments in amino acid catabolism. In contrast, sedentary individuals showed lower abundance of microbial energy producing pathways. Conclusion: Our analysis revealed functional patterns particularly energy metabolism and amino acid biosynthesis pathways in sport-specific groups suggesting that the gut microbiome may support high metabolic demand. Strain-level investigation is ongoing alongside functional profiling, aiming to reveal key microbial genomic signatures in sport-specific microbiomes. Keywords: Microbiome, Athlete, MAGs, Functional pathways, Exercise