Seeking an alternative to clean

April Henning, Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA.

One of my frustrations in talking, reading, and writing about (anti-)doping is negotiating clean. Clean has become a kind of short hand when discussing anti-doping efforts in sport and is used widely by anti-doping bodies, sport federations, athletes, media, and fans.  Broadly, clean athletes are those who have not been found to engage in doping practices. In order to attain the ideal of doping-free sport we must “clean it up” by banning athletes who violate anti-doping rules. Though it may appear to be clear and intuitive, clean is a complex, subjective, and often problematic concept through which to discuss doping and enhancement. Clean becomes even murkier outside the context of elite sport, where anti-doping rules do not apply or are weakly enforced.

Scholars, including several members of INDR, have noted the problems with clean to discuss doping and anti-doping. Clean has no clear meaning with regard to anti-doping, but such a vague concept can be useful to underpin a strategy that may be viewed as arbitrary (Dimeo, 2016; Møller & Dimeo, 2014).  The alternative to clean is, of course, dirty, and these opposites work to place athletes in categories based less on fact than on conceptions of morality (Henne, 2015). These concepts are deployed to suggest that clean is the norm and anything outside of that is deviant (Henne, 2015).  This limits how athletes can talk or think about anti-doping, as anything perceived as counter to clean immediately categorizes them as dirty.  Researchers have even noted their hesitation to use clean, doing so only because it is the language used by study participants (Englar-Carlson et al., 2016).

In the clean narrative, athletes shoulder all the burden: clean sport is only possible if all athletes taking part are clean. As such, anti-doping relies primarily on detecting anti-doping through testing, ignoring both the social context in which sport is contested, and the networks and pressures that influence athletes’ decision-making (Connor, 2009; Pappa & Kennedy, 2013). With a narrow focus on athletes, anti-doping “minimizes the influence of the pressures and norms of the sports environment and encourages athletes to take responsibility for alter­ing their own behaviour” (Pappa & Kennedy, 2013, p. 290).

Most crucially, in my view, clean sport is no guarantee of healthy sport. Athletes don’t necessarily view doping as very far from clean practices in which they and others already engage, such as supplement use (Outram & Stewart, 2015). Some substances may pose health risks to athletes but not be banned, while others that are useful for health or medicinal purposes are prohibited (Waddington et al., 2013).  Strict prohibitions and the stigma of being labeled dirty may also lead athletes to seek out enhancements unknown to testers to avoid detection (Møller & Dimeo, 2014), further putting athlete health at risk. 

While my initial attempt to supplant clean as a way of thinking and talking about athletes was unsuccessful, there is an opportunity to do better. Given the number of colleagues who disclosed that they too dislike clean as a way of talking about (anti-)doping, there seems to be an appetite for it, too. Clarifying what we are really talking about when we talk about doping, shifting the scope of our discussions to hold all stakeholders to account for the current state of sport, and prioritizing athlete health require a more specific and less judgmental vocabulary and narrative. We need to move beyond the limits of clean if we are to better understand doping and improve on strategies for addressing it. 

Connor, J. M. (2009). Towards a sociology of drugs in sport. Sport in society, 12(3), 327-328.

Dimeo, P. (2016). The myth of clean sport and its unintended consequences. Performance Enhancement & Health, 4(3), 103-110.

Englar-Carlson, M., Gleaves, J., Macedo, E., & Lee, H. (2016). What about the clean athletes? The need for positive psychology in anti-doping research. Performance Enhancement & Health, 4(3), 116-122.

Henne, K. E. (2015). Testing for athlete citizenship: Regulating doping and sex in sport. Rutgers University Press.

Møller, V., & Dimeo, P. (2014). Anti-doping–the end of sport. International journal of sport policy and politics, 6(2), 259-272.

Outram, S. M., & Stewart, B. (2015). Condemning and condoning: Elite amateur cyclists’ perspectives on drug use and professional cycling. International Journal of Drug Policy, 26(7), 682-687.

Pappa, E., & Kennedy, E. (2013). ‘It was my thought… he made it a reality’: Normalization and responsibility in athletes’ accounts of performance-enhancing drug use. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 48(3), 277-294.