Legitimacy driven change at the World Anti-Doping Agency

Abstract

The effectiveness of the World Anti-Doping Agency as an international non-governmental organisation with a mission to regulate anti-doping policy has been challenged before by doping scandals in sport. Historically, anti-doping policy development has been primarily reactive, determined by the need for dominant organisations to maintain power rather than to protect athletes. The purpose of this paper is to explore reactive anti-doping policy change from a multi-level legitimacy perspective. Using multi-level legitimacy theory and the concept of legitimacy challenges, it is argued that reactive policy change is motivated by a need to manage perceived organisational legitimacy. The recent exposure of systematic doping in Russia is used as an example to support this analysis. These findings are discussed in the context of current criticisms of anti-doping policy.

Doped and disclosed

“…52 Eventually, the Kremlin ended up reiterating two mutually incompatible-if not exclusive-versions of the doping controversy: on the one hand, Putin presumed that there might be some degree of political reasoning behind targeting Russia on doping charges; yet, on the other hand, he accepted the legitimacy of international regulatory bodies in this sphere. The political logic is ultimately conducive to the "new Cold War" argument with its conspiratorial flavor and an oversimplified idea of the "collective West" behind the attack against Russia, 53 which completely ignores contradictions between WADA and the IOC, 54 or the harsh criticism of WADA's policy of urine testing and whereabouts in the Western media and academia. 55 Yet the logic of governance is by and large supportive of submitting Russia to the global biopolitical governmentality, and ultimately this implies that Russia was not an object of malicious and intentional ostracization, but rather a victim of the new system of surveillance and control; lacking due immunity and protection against WADA's policies, Russia exposed itself to global media scrutiny, which led to severe sanctions.…”

Cycling alone: Team Sky’s difficult quest for credibility during the 2015 Tour de France

“…For example, Lance Armstrong was tested more than 250 times without a positive result while he was actually doping (United States Anti-Doping Agency, 2012: 130). Thus, the gap between the promises of this ‘technology-based detection regime’ (Meier and Reinold, 2018) and the recurrence of doping scandals weakened the role of anti-doping organizations as ‘trust devices’ (Karpik, 1996), especially the WADA (Read et al, 2019). Despite the UCI’s efforts to strengthen its anti-doping system through the creation of the CADF in 2008, the issue of credibility unceasingly resurfaced in the words of federation members.…”

“…Indeed, to operate as trust devices, these organizations must themselves appear credible and present the proof of their trustworthiness for an actor to risk trusting them. The UCI, CADF and even WADA (Read et al, 2019) are not predominantly perceived as trustworthy institutions that are able to prevent doping. Furthermore, they seem to face difficulties of working together and with the teams.…”

The World Anti-Doping Agency: Guardian of Elite Sport’s Credibility

“…WADA has been fiercely criticized for how it has handled the Russian doping affair, but virtually none of the critics called for its abolition. On the contrary, they can be interpreted as pleas for a sense of reality, reform and even institutional strengthening of WADA: to increase its independence from the IOC and national governments; to raise its budget; to achieve (better) compliance with the WADC; to strengthen its investigations and intelligence gathering capacity; to better institutionalize the viewpoints of athletes; and to balance the ideal of a doping-free sport with athletes' fundamental (human) rights concerning privacy, discrimination, fair trial and the like (Houlihan and Hanstad 2019;Landrove and Hendriks 2017;Read et al 2019;Waddington and Møller 2019). The solution of these issues is mainly sought in and requested from WADA itself.…”