Anti Doping Code and Controls: Social Sorting For Fair Play?

Viewing doping controls in the lights of social sorting, puts a new perspective on the subject. Besides touching on issues such as data protection, citizens rights of informational self-determination, privacy and the right to be let alone, those controls foster forms of social sorting, albeit ones that claims to sort out particular subjects in the name of fairness. As much as doping practices are a problem to a culture of fairness and good sportsmanship, so are the controls.

From existing research, it is apparent that the athletes‘ perspective is missing in the discussion. The athletes are the object of the public debate, rather than the subject. Athletes that are convicted (or even only suspected) of doping practices are blamed and condemned - often by the same people that were generating the pressure under which the decision to take illegal performance enhancing substances was made. Doping and its controls therefore operate in a twofold field of social sorting: one that sorts out the guilty - and one that sorts out the losers, which may turn to illegal measures to improve their situation.

From interviews with athletes, officials and doping controllers on doping control practices, I will highlight what forms of social sorting are generated through doping controls, how they are perceived and what discourses are being formed.

I want to draw the attention to other issues within the debate on doping, such as have not received wide attention and are not likely to, as athletes more and more are put under a general suspicion within the system that is generating a massive pressure and puts athletes at risk. Social sorting is by no means an intended consequence, but a „collateral“ effect that does play a major role on how these controls are perceived and hence legitimised.