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Comfortable being uncomfortable : a study of athlete and doping control officer relations

University of British Columbia

The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES) employs stringent doping control protocols to: “advocate for sport that is fair, safe and open; and [to] protect the integrity of sport” (CCES, 2011e, para. 3). As a result, Canada’s elite athletes are required to disclose their daily whereabouts to ensure that they can be located to provide urine or blood samples in full view of doping control officers (DCOs) at any time, with no advance notice (CCES, 2011g). The doping control process impinges on personal privacy (Kayser, Mauron, & Miah, 2007), violates autonomy and the right to self-determination (Hanstad & Loland, 2009), involves the policing of athletic bodies (Park, 2005) and positive doping results may destroy an athlete’s career (WADA, 2009f). As a result, athlete and DCO relations can be awkward and in some instances very adversarial, yet no research exists that specifically addresses this topic. The purpose of this research was to determine how athletes and DCOs understood their relations and which elements of those relations were the most contentious. In order to unpack the apparent unbalanced power relations between athlete and DCOs, I drew on Foucault’s understanding of power and his concepts of discipline, panopticism, and governmentality. Data collection consisted of 20 interviews, 10 with Canadian Olympic swimmers and 10 with Canadian DCOs. The findings revealed that athlete and DCO understandings of doping control relations differed only slightly, but contention arose when there were inefficiencies in the doping control process or rule confusion. Similarities in athletes’ and DCOs’ understandings were attributed to Foucault’s governmentality and the workings of disciplinary power, as athletes and DCOs had internalized and normalized CCES’s guidelines. Furthermore, contention in doping control relations was related to Foucault’s understanding that power is both repressive and productive. Points of resistance were mobilized in athlete and DCO relations when they were not accompanied by knowledge forms that justified doping control procedures that were highlighted as a hindrance to performance, inconvenient and a violation of personal integrity. Future research is required to determine whether these patterns exist in other sports and in other countries.

Text

2014-04-11

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/46378

Kinesiology

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/