Immunizing Inefficient Field Frames for Mitigating Social Problems: The Institutional Work Behind the Technocratic Antidoping System

Abstract

Doping is making headlines again. After whistle-blowers revealed systematic doping practices, parts of the Russian team were suspended from the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, 2016. Before, the sport world had seen major doping scandals, such as, revelations about East Germany's largescale state doping program, the Festina scandal during the 1998 Tour de France, the Fuentes affair, and the fall of cycling idol Lance Armstrong (Dimeo, 2014). This article is motivated by fact that none of these scandals has been detected by the heavily expanded technocratic doping test system. Without denying that the test system has achieved some successes, these revelations about undetected misconduct indicate serious flaws of the test system. Whereas research on athletes' perception of the likelihood of detection by the test system are rare, some studies conducted among athletes suggest that the technocratic test system is met with distrust and frustration (Efverström, Bäckström, Ahmadi, & Hoff, 2016; Overbye, 2016). Furthermore, a number of studies suggest that the extent of doping is significantly higher than that found in the official testing statistics (de Hon,

The toxic doxa of “clean sport” and IOC’s and WADA’s quest for credibility

“…Therefore, despite numerous controversies between sport actors and scientists within WADA (Hunt, 2007: 189), science and technology were extensively used to showcase the advances in anti-doping. Before the creation of WADA, the IOC and its Medical Commission played a central role in defining the anti-doping doxa (Hunt et al, 2012; Meier and Reinold, 2018; Wagner and Pedersen, 2014).…”

Superior Sporting Performance in Athletics: Determinants and Sustainability

“…Unfortunately, the Russian doping scandal suggests that competitors cannot trust that the test system developed by the World Anti‐Doping Agency (WADA) will detect such distortions. As with other major doping scandals, evidence about Russia's systematic misconduct was not provided by the expanded test system but by a whistleblower (Duval, ; Meier and Reinold, ). Hence, less‐established countries have to take into account that superior performance capacities might reflect superior skills in illegitimate practices, which have remained hard to detect.…”

Mediatization and Doping: Investigating the Interplay in News Framing of Rider/Doping Suspicion During the Tour de France

“…Significantly, the scandal contributed to a major development in the institutionalization of anti-doping, with the founding of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 1999, tasked with establishing protocols and developing methods and strategies for the regulation of sport (Christiansen, 2005). Meier and Reinhold (2018) explain that the institutionalized technocratic test frame by which anti-doping protocols were perceived widely as effective inflated expectations of their efficacy. Athletes were still willing to dope and became adept at avoiding detection.…”