Newsletters
2021
2022 INDR Conference
INDR Conference 2022 - Registration Is Open
Dear colleagues,
We are delighted to announce that the registration for the INDR conference in 2022 is now open. The conference will take place on 18 and 19 August 2022 at Aarhus University. We plan to hold the conference with on-site participation only and do not currently foresee including online participation. We believe face to face interaction and informal socializing are key components of the INDR network and part of what makes our community so special.
Read more about the conference.
Journal Watch 2021
By Katharina Gatterer
A list of doping-related publications from our members and others in 2021
- Albaker, W., Alkhars, A., Elamin, Y., Jatoi, N., Boumarah, D., & Al-Hariri, M. (2021). Anabolic-androgenic steroid abuse among gym users, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia. Medicina, 57(7). https://doi.org/10.3390/medicina57070703
- Arbouche, N., Bottinelli, C., Gerace, E., & Gheddar, L. (2021). Interest of HRMS systems in analytical toxicology: Focus on doping products. Toxicologie Analytique et Clinique [in press]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxac.2021.10.001
- Arun, P.J. (2021). Analysis on awareness of doping among physical education students in Calicut University. International Journal of Physiology, Nutrition and Physical Education, 6(2), 165-167.
2020
December 2020
INDR editorial - December 2020
By April Henning, Jörg Krieger and Paul Dimeo
As we head towards the end of 2020, we can’t ignore the challenges and upheaval of the past year. We hardly need to reiterate the effects of Covid-19 on societies around the world, as we are all living through our own versions of pandemic life. From an academic standpoint, many of us will spend many years to come sorting out the repercussions of the near complete halt of global sport this past spring and the ongoing impact of the global health crisis on all physical activities. This includes the impacts on doping behaviors and anti-doping efforts on all levels.
Read the rest of the editorial
Perspectives on Doping and Anti-Doping
We launched a new initiative just over a year ago called Perspectives on Doping and Anti-Doping. The idea was to keep the discussion going between conferences by offering the opportunity for individuals to present accounts from their specific perspective. While there is no intention to become lobbyists, we are raising the more critical issues which often get lost in the headline stories of scandals or complexities of legal cases. As anti-doping testing increasingly widens to include amateur and masters athletes, there are many more cases where athletes are disproportionately affected by policies designed for elite athletes who have the support of nutritionists, doctors and anti-doping educators.
Journal Watch: June - November
By Katharina Gatterer and Emmanuel Macedo
A list of doping-related publications from our members and others between June and November 2020
Aboagye, E., Yawson, J., & Nyantakyi Appiah, K. (2020) Doping practices, knowledge of anti-doping control and roles of physical education teachers in anti-doping education. Social Education Research, 1(2), 173-184.
Adams, B. (2020). Barry Bonds v. Alex Rodriguez: Don’t hate the player; hate the steroid-manufactured game. In J. Lamothe & D. Barbie (Eds.), Athletes Breaking Bad: Essays on Transgressive Sports Figures (pp. 95-111). McFarland.
Adknis, A. (2020) Trapped in the binary divide: How forced contraceptives violate the World Anti-Doping Code. American University International Law Review, 35(3), 531-576.
Summer 2020
A tearful farewell
By John Gleaves & Ask Vest Christiansen
Here is your tearful farewell editorial. Well, it is with some melancholy that we now state that this will be our last editorial for the INDR as mangers of the Network. We, John and Ask, have co-worked on this since we took over from Verner Møller in 2012. Back then, Verner passed the network on saying: “It is about time to hand over the management of the network to younger colleagues with new ideas and who are more familiar with the new media and their potential and a vision to modernize the network so that it does not stagnate in inertia.” Some may have felt that Prof Møller was being slightly grumpy when he, in the same editorial, quoted Marshall McLuhan’s renowned statement “The media is the message” as a prophetic account on how academics (like elite athletes) with new technologies were constantly being monitored to check the quantity of their research output so that “public money is not wasted”. If it also sounded like he was preparing the ground for us to spend hours and hours on Twitter with statements and comments on big and small related to INDR, it was a prediction that was never realized. None of us are good at that, so regarding the network’s appearance on social media, not much has changed since 2012.
Read the rest of the editorial
The new leadership
Many of you will already be familiar with the new INDR Co-Directors, either through their scholarship or as members of INDR. Jörg, April, and Paul look forward to picking up from John and Ask and thank them for their years of leading the Network.
Junior coordinators
We are happy to announce that we have created two new junior coordinator positions for INDR. Katharina Gatterer and Emmanuel Macedo will be responsible for the new journal watch in our newsletters and will assist in planning the early career workshop that will run in tandem with the 2021 INDR conference.
Changes to the INDR newsletter
We will publish the newsletter three times per year. The newsletter will include some new features beginning in next issue. In addition to the editorial from us, we will feature two of our network researchers, including one focused on members who are early career researchers. If you would like to be featured in our newsletter or would like to nominate an early career member to be included, please get in touch with us.
We will also introduce a new section for recent network publications of interest. We invite all of our network members to send us information and links to new books, articles, and contributed chapters as they become available so we can include them in our newsletters.
We also ask all INDR members to update their profiles on the INDR Members website. If you wish to add new content and/or an updated profile picture, please send your information to Martin Hawkins (mh@ph.au.dk).
New INDR feature: Perspectives on Doping and Anti-doping
This is a new venture led by the new leadership team. Our aim is to collect accounts from athletes and other relevant stakeholders of various anti-doping experiences they have had, both good and bad. The INDR has always taken a balanced approach to the debates within this subject area and welcomed participants from a wide range of organisations. As academics, we have the opportunity to present a range of perspectives and therefore to allow and give a platform for debate about the foundations of anti-doping, the implementation of education, testing and sanctions, and potential future directions.
Save the date: 2021 INDR conference and early career researcher workshop
We are happy to announce the dates for the 2021 INDR Conference. The conference will take place on 19 and 20 August 2021. As in previous years, the conference will be hosted by the Department of Public Health at Aarhus University.
In our autumn newsletter, we will announce the conference theme and present the line-up of our keynote speakers. However, we would like to draw your attention to an Early Career Researcher workshop that we intend to hold the day before the conference. At the workshop, we’re hoping to give young researchers the chance to exchange ideas and team up with more experienced scholars. More detailed information on this workshop will follow.
2019
INDR editorial, Spring 2019
By Ask Vest Christiansen and John Gleaves
We are fighting the urge to start another editorial with the cliché, “The more things change, the more they stay the same” since it seems every editorial starts with the same sentiments. However, as we prepare again for our biennially conference this coming August 22 and 23 of 2019, it seems we find ourselves squarely focused on what has changed and what has stayed the same. Not only because of the recent revelations of blood transfusions involving Austrian cross-country ski racers (that has already spread to cycling and promises more sports), but because the theme of the 2019 conference is focusing on the two decades of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s role in leading a global harmonized anti-doping campaign. With twenty years of WADA, now is a chance for scholars to assess the organization’s impact on doping in elite sport.
The effectiveness and performance of the World Anti-Doping Agency: a framework for analysis
By Barrie Houlihan, Lougborough University, UK, with Dag Vidar Hanstad
Although there are a number of studies of the effectiveness of the global anti-doping regime less attention has been paid to the performance and effectiveness of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) as the lead organization within the policy regime. The aim of the paper is to design a framework for the analysis of WADA’s performance and effectiveness and to utilize the framework to provide an assessment of the impact of the Agency within the broader policy regime.
Contentious policies and practice: challenges and opportunities researching (anti-) doping in sport
By Professor Susan Backhouse, Carnegie School of Sport, Leeds Beckett University, UK
Research, policy and practice on the complex social problem of doping in sport is a contentious and contested field. Consequently, it requires collaborative researcher-decision-maker partnerships in order to enhance the richness, relevance and real-world applicability of empirical research findings. Accordingly, co-produced knowledge better facilitates the implementation of research informed policy and practice by addressing the relevance gap in research. Yet, co-production of knowledge in the context of anti-doping can be challenging because researchers and policy-makers often work to different timeframes, have different priorities, and staff movement may weaken or disrupt the programme of research.
Athlete Representation within Anti-Doping – A Proposal
By Ali Jawad, Paralympic powerlifter
In recent times, anti-doping has been a prevalent topic within the sporting landscape. International confidence within the anti-doping system is at an all-time low. The disconnect between WADA and the global athlete community continue to increase. There has been a big uprising in the athlete voice and especially athletes are uniting in demanding transparency, honesty, and independence within WADA, when vital decisions are implemented that affect athletes and clean sport.
WADA, the IOC, and the Russians: Can Anti-Doping Survive in the Era of Putin?
By John Hoberman, University of Texas, Austin, USA
Over the past several years the politics of international sports governance, and its affiliated anti-doping efforts, have been subverted by the de facto dictator of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, in conjunction with his conflicts, and subsequent reconciliations, with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA).
Following Russian failures at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games, an enraged Putin resolved to produce a 2014 Sochi Winter Olympiad that would compensate for the disgrace of Vancouver. Once it had been uncovered, the state-sponsored doping conspiracy that helped to produce Russian success at Sochi compelled the IOC and WADA to suspend Russian sports organizations’
membership in the “Olympic Family.” The question now was how and when — and, conceivably, whether — Russia’s readmission to the Olympic system might be achieved.
The United States Federal Government Vs. Lance Armstrong: Determining Who Knew What and When They Knew It
By John Gleaves, Professor of Kinesiology, California State University, Fullerton, USA
In May of 2013, lawyers for Lance Armstrong invited me to provide testimony in the fraud case between Armstrong and the U.S. Government. The fraud case alleged that Armstrong’s doping coupled with his public denials of doping defrauded his sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service, and consequently American citizens. If found guilty of fraud, Armstrong would have to repay three times the total sponsorship U.S. Postal had paid the team, a sum nearing $100,000,000.00 USD.
Everybody wants the world to change, so how should anti-doping?
By Olivier de Hon
There are currently 7.7 billion people living on earth. At the time of the Rio Olympic Games, an estimated 47% of those people had some interest in sport. Moreover, a decent percentage of those sports enthusiasts have the luxury to actually think about the rules that govern sport, how they came about, and how they might be changed for the better. The crème de la crème of these sports thinkers are gathering in Aarhus every two years.
A pragmatic and critical sociology of anti-doping
By Patrick Trabal, Universite Paris Nanterre
The presentation will emphasize the value of using sociological models to come to understand doping practices among athletes and the reality of the implementation process of WADA’s anti-doping devices.
First, we will make use of a pragmatic sociology of risk (Chateauraynaud & Debaz, 2017) to examine the ways in which axiology, devices and realities are articulated in anti-doping related criticism. This will allow us to imagine the necessary social conditions so the anti-doping regulation could possibly change. We will question two elements: the reasons why doping is almost never analysed as a health issue; the conditions needed for the anti-doping actors' work to be different.
2018
INDR editorial, Autumn 2018
By Ask Vest Christiansen and John Gleaves
It has been a while since our last update. While we do not want to tire you with tedious excuses on the long INDR-silence, we can reveal, that one thing that has been on our agenda, is preparing the 2019 INDR conference in Aarhus, Denmark. So, we now have a strong theme and a number of confirmed keynotes ready, that we are confident will excite many INDR members and previous conference delegates.
Dietary supplement contamination: Is clean ever clean enough?
By Erik Duiven, Olivier de Hon & Laila Spruijt, Anti-Doping Authority Netherlands
The United States effectuated the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994. It set the worldwide governmental standard on how to deal with dietary supplements. Especially notable, it meant that the supplement industry was no longer responsible for the safety and quality of their products. For the less ethically driven part of the industry, this meant they were handed a carte blanche to explore improvements of their dietary supplement business, as long as they were able to keep severe health hazards under the regulating body’s poorly functioning radar. It is thus no surprise that, from that moment on nutritional supplements were often found to have a chemical composition deviating from the ingredient information communicated on the label.
Blowing the whistle on doping in sport
By Kelsey Erickson, Leeds Beckett University, UK
Growing recognition for the magnitude of corruption in international sport has prompted significant interest in exposing and eradicating wrongdoing in sport; in particular, doping. In light of ongoing doping scandals (e.g., Russian doping), individuals are being increasingly encouraged – and expected – to play an active role in deterring the behavior and whistleblowing has emerged as a primary means for achieving this. Commonly defined as “the disclosure by organisation members (former or current) of illegal, immoral, or illegitimate practices under the control of their employers, to persons or organisations that may be able to affect action” (Near & Miceli, 1985: 4), whistleblowing has proven effective for exposing doping (e.g., Yuliya Stepanova/Vitaly Stepanov regarding Russian Athletics).