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QUESTION
Please carefully read the scholarly article posted on CANVAS for this week. I would like you to provide a 100 word report in your own words of what you think the argument/s in the paper are. You do not need to reference the report. Importantly please provide an argument and not a summary of the paper. You may have to read the paper a few times before you are able to identify the arguments the authors make.
100 words*
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Introduction: doping as a historical and cultural practice
Grand cycling events such as the Tour de France (TDF) are often framed as spectacular occasions that offer something more than a standard cycling race for riders and specta-tors alike. Embracing this exceptionality means cyclists’ performances become a part of a theatrical space with an aura that throws up heroes, whilst encapsulating audiences and offering phenomenal displays (Dugard and Sidwells, 2011). Moreover, professional cycling also has a unique and elaborate moral code that contains strict and unwritten rules regarding what competitors must adhere to whilst either performing or speaking about their job (Moller, 2010). Caught up in an ethical minefield consuming vast amounts of media and public attention, doping has therefore become a realistic feature of cycling:
with suggestions that ‘good’ performances can only be denoted through winning (Johanson, 1987). Whilst this ethically complex situation and an enforced doping ban make it difficult to garner the true extent of drug use, such a situation does at least carry severe career consequences for those concerned (Jones, 2010; Pitsch and Emrich, 2012). In addition to ornate moral codes, the history and acceptability of drug use is also far from straightforward. Despite drugs existing in sport for over 2000 years, they only became problematized in the 1960s when their availability increased and national pres-tige became associated with sporting success (Dimeo, 2007, 2008; Waddington, 2005). At this time research in communist societies looked for methods that would improve cyclists’ performance, including the use of doping products. However, the publicized deaths of the cyclists Knud Enemark Jenson in 1960 and Tommy Simpson in 1967, both linked to the use of drugs in competition, called for a much harsher approach (Dimeo, 2008). The European Council passed a resolution against doping after the Danish cyclist Jenson died and following the death of Simpson, the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) published a banned list of substances (Moller, 2010).
Another well-publicized high profile instance of doping occurred in 1998 when the entire Festina team withdrew from the TDF following a team masseuse being found with four hundred vials of erythropoietin (EPO). Whilst doping had been ambivalently accepted as something going on behind the scenes between 1960 and 1998, after these periods, public opinion shifted towards greater widespread condemnation (Christiansen and Hjorngard, 2013). The most recent high profile example materialized in June 2012 when the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) charged Lance Armstrong, the seven times TDF winner with doping between 1998 and 2011 (USADA, 2012). Since Armstrong’s confession, many more doping accounts have shown that the practice main-tains prevalence among professional cyclists, despite costly and zealous anti-doping campaigns (Jones, 2010). Whilst the voices of athletes who face pressure to use banned substances are well heard (Hardie et al., 2010), evidence also suggests that both corpora-tization and scientization mean there are great pressures imposed on all athletes to adopt any means necessary to win (Stewart and Smith, 2010).
Of course, not all cyclists are dopers. As Morente-Sánchez and Zabala (2013) note, most athletes at least acknowledge doping as potentially breaching the impurity of sport, even though these individuals may have been handpicked to support anti-doping cam-paigns. Even the accounts of athletes who say they do not dope must be read with caution as often there can be a delay of several years before drug use is proven with a more advanced testing procedure. Caution must also be taken with all discussions of doping as a result of the false-consensus effect, whereby individuals report a non-existent behavior or falsely tell their experience (Petroczi and Haugen, 2012). This therefore means there is no reliable epidemiology of drug use available that establishes the patterns, causes, reasons and effects of doping on a cyclist’s health, work performance and career.
Equally there has been little effective and reliable evaluation of anti-doping policies that promote prohibition. Instead research is heavily scientific and identifies the ergo-genic properties of particular drugs and methods for identifying prohibited substances (Houlihan, 2002, 2005). This negates the psychological and social aspects of drugs and the interplay this has with cyclists’ careers, something necessary to holistically evaluate and support anti-doping policy. The production and implementation of prohibition stand-ards are also somewhat ambivalent (Hanstad et al., 2008), all pointing to diverse mean-ings and offering little conceptualization of a cyclist’s work performance.
This paper therefore focuses on how drug use is understood in professional cyclists’ accounts of their performance. Prior to outlining its methods, it reviews literature and framings of sport and cycling deviance. An understanding of the notion of ‘sport as work’ is also introduced. Theoretically Becker’s (1963, 1964) framing of deviance provides a framework for exploring how cyclists present doping as part of their job performance to themselves and onlookers. There are then three findings sections showing how and why cyclists legitimate their behavior at an individual, team and grand cycling level, before a concluding section highlighting how doping has become a form of ‘performance ego-ism’. This allows cyclists to legitimate their behavior and also emphasizes a more per-formative version of the spirit of sport in tandem with modern work practices.
Framings of sport deviance
As noted already, views on doping in cycling are often polarized. One side views it as a moral indignation, presenting it as creating unfair competition, being unnatural, unhealthy and destructive of sport’s modeling function (Moller, 2010). Such is reflected in the World Anti Doping Agency’s (WADA) code that defines performance enhancement as a health risk to the athlete and which is fundamentally ‘contrary to the spirit of sport’ (WADA, 2015: 16). However, this position closes down in-depth understandings of how cyclists may locate their behavior within social and cultural contexts, including the com-petitive work environment in which they are situated. As a result, incidents of doping can no longer be meaningfully located within discussions of each cyclist’s supposedly inap-propriate moral standing.
The other view on doping sees it as a necessary part of performance in top-level sport. As a result of the social environment that cyclists are located in it could be that doping is only one form of behavior in a sport where ‘approved’ forms of deviance and rule break-ing occur throughout. Some examples include activities such as drafting cars, the use of ‘sticky bottles’ (when a cyclist gets a tow from a team car by both parties holding on tight to his changed water bottle) and an agreement of the podium positions in the final break-away before arriving at the finish line (Christiansen and Hjorngard, 2013). A well cited argument of ‘approved’ forms of deviance in sport is Hughes’ and Coakley’s (1991) interactionist-inspired concept of ‘deviant overconformity’. Deviant overconformity consists of athletes uncritically accepting the rules in sport and adhering to them through doing more than necessary (Coakley, 2003). From such, winning or making money is not the sole motivation of an athlete’s or cyclist’s performance (Hughes and Coakley, 1991). Instead their goal is to maintain and uphold their role in featuring as an elite athlete by going above the call of duty and presenting this to others in their environment (Hughes and Coakley, 1991).
ANSWER
Doping and Cycling
The author claims that doping is a form of performance egoism that allows cyclists to justify or legitimize their doping. Simply put, cyclists use doping to promote their performance ego. At the individual level, they do it for self-idealization. At the team level, it is done to support team performance and as a currency for social acceptance. The authors also claim that the Grand Tour has set high standards that cyclists find impossible to meet without doping. According to the authors, sports are characterized by exceptionality and elitism. Cyclists have to rely on doping to meet these standards. Because exceptional performance has been normalized, doping is no longer an exceptional measure. The authors recommend legalizing doping through a harm-reduction approach. They argue that legitimizing doping will allow cyclists to meet these normalized exceptional standards, promoting a fairer competitive spirit. It will also allow cyclists’ performance egos to flourish, which, in turn, will promote the traditional spirit of sport in cycling.
References
Smith, C. (2017). Tour du dopage: Confessions of doping professional cyclists in a modern work environment. International review for the sociology of sport, 52(1), 97-111. https://leicester.figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Tour_du_Dopage_Confessions_of_doping_professional_cyclists_in_a_modern_work_environment/10124597/files/18246737.pdf
