Doping is often discussed as the individual athlete’s own decision. The athlete wants to win and strategically chooses to take drugs to reach the goal.
When the cyclist Lance Armstrong recently confessed that he used performance enhancing drugs while he won Tour de France seven times, he personally took responsibility for his actions and presented doping as his own decision.
Simultaneously, he said in the interview with Oprah Winfrey that he didn’t feel like a cheater while he was using the drugs. Doping was experienced as part of the job. It didn’t feel wrong while it went on!
He suddenly spoke of doping not in terms of individuals making strategic choices, but as a doping culture to which he had belonged without reflecting or making conscious choices, and which he now wanted to change.
In a recent article in Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Ashkan Atry investigates, with Mats G. Hansson and Ulrik Kihlbom, this easily neglected collective origin of individual athletes’ feelings of right and wrong.
Lance Armstrong confessed doping and took full responsibility for it as his own choice. It belongs to the dramaturgy of the responsible confession. But perhaps this dramaturgy presents doping in a misleadingly individualistic light?
Ashkan Atry thinks so. Doping is a culture, materially and emotionally. The phenomenon reaches beyond the individual athlete, and involves not only team-mates but also coaches, doctors, sponsors and fans (with their demands for superhuman performances).
The feeling that it is okay to dope is socially created. To successfully handle doping, we must avoid tempting individualistic perspectives and focus more on social processes and what Atry calls emotional cultures in sport.
I recommend the article as a refreshingly realistic approach to a phenomenon that otherwise easily evokes ineffective moralizing gestures.
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