John Gleaves

Sport, Drugs and Amateurism: Tracing the Real Cultural Origins of Anti-Doping Rules in International Sport

The historiography of doping has focused primarily on anti-doping efforts that followed in the wake of Knud Enemark Jensens death in 1960 and culminated in the first Olympic anti-doping tests in 1968. Such focus has often led to the mistaken claim that prior to 1960, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had not banned doping, and, more importantly, ignores the cultural origins of anti-doping that took hold prior to the Second World War and which shaped the IOCs response to doping following Jensens demise. By tracing early doping practices through turn-of-the-century horse racing and its concerns over gambling and the interwar efforts to ban doping in Olympic sports through the amateurism code, the authors examine the influences behind the IOCs decision to first ban doping in 1938. More importantly, it roots the post-Jensen anti-doping rhetoric and legislation in the early twentieth-century push to defend amateurism against the perceived nefarious forces of gambling, commercialism, professionalism and totalitarianism that were supposedly overrunning amateur sport in the 1930s.

Enhancing the Odds: Horse Racing, Gambling and the First Anti-Doping Movement in Sport, 1889–1911

The sporting world has long considered doping both a recent phenomenon and one associated with performance enhancement. It has also typically viewed the debate over prohibiting doping to be one about safety, fair play and the spirit of sport. Yet this article will show that concerns about doping, which first emerged in the sport of horse racing, was indeed about fair play, but not fair play for the athletes. Rather the fair play threatened by doping related to gambling. Indeed, turn-of-the-century horse racing viewed doping as a tool equally useful for improving a horses performance as it was for slowing it. This article concludes that such concerns over doping reflect the ‘developed cosmology’ of the early-twentieth-century public imagination. In this way, the historical roots of anti-doping reveal much about todays fascination with drugs and sports.

Ethics, Nationalism, and the Imagined Community: The Case Against Inter-National Sport

The focus of this article will be sport predicated on contests between nation-states, or what we will call inter-national sport, at the elite level. While much literature on the politics of sport has focused on the proper role of the nation-state in regards to specific sport issues, few have questioned whether elite sport ought to involve nationalism as part of its competition. Most who have defended such sport argue that the benefits of nationalism and the national identity outweigh any potential unintended harm. In this article, we question these conclusions by arguing that both lusory and ethical considerations undermine elite sport’s emphasis on inter-national contests. We will be trying to argue that these artifacts no longer should play a primary role in determining eligibility or serving as the basis for determining competitive sides. We will make this argument by focusing on the ethical dilemmas posed specifically by inter-national competition including international discord and reduced quality of competition. We also argue that promoting national differences does not serve a useful lusory role in elite sport. However, we will concede that Morgan’s respect for the narratives associated with sport indicate that national identity may continue playing a limited role in elite sporting contests. So while we make an exception for a soft national cultural narrative, we conclude that such arguments taken together indicate that national identities ought to have a much diminished role, if any at all, in elite sport.

Manufactured Dope: How the 1984 US Olympic Cycling Team Rewrote the Rules on Drugs in Sports

At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, the US cycling team not only won its first Olympic cycling medal since 1912 but also added eight more, marking a triumph for the team and its Polish-born coach, Eddie Borysewicz. Soon, however, news leaked that the seven members of the US cycling team, four of whom won medals, had employed controversial blood transfusions. Though not prohibited by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the news caused a firestorm within the press and led to a significant revision of the IOC Medical Commissions anti-doping rules. Previous historical scholarship has ignored this event, focusing instead on early doping scandals such as Knud Jensen or more recent controversies such as Ben Johnson and Lance Armstrong. However, this event caused a significant shift within the IOC Medical Commissions attitude towards doping. Prior to 1984, the IOC Medical Commission had hesitated to prohibit any substance, including anabolic steroids, if it could not detect the substance through testing. The willingness of the US team to experiment with new medical procedures to improve performance galvanised the Medical Commission and set in motion new anti-doping policies that remain in place today.

Categorical Shortcomings: Application, Adjudication, and Contextual Descriptions of Game Rules

In the final extra time minutes of the 2010 World Cup quarterfinal match between Uruguay and Ghana, Uruguay’s star striker Luis Suarez deliberately batted the ball with his hand off of his own team’s goal line. The referee quickly detected his action, penalizing Suarez with a red card for deliberately handling the ball and rewarding Ghana with a penalty kick. Given that he had no other way to stop the ball and with only seconds remaining, his decision appeared—despite the odds—to be a calculated one. Had Suarez not stopped the ball, Uruguay’s World Cup run was over. Even with the impending penalty kick, Uruguay’s chances of winning were slim but not impossible. Yet when Ghana’s Asamoah Gyan failed to convert the subsequent penalty kick, Suarez’s “deal with the devil” turned into either an act of strategic brilliance or the mischievous manipulation of a loophole in soccer rules. Suarez’s actions raise questions about games and their rules. He openly violated the rules and willingly accepted his punishment, yet he also broke the rules in order to deny Ghana a fair and earned victory. So his case indicates a larger problem—what to make of this type of egregious but strategic rule breaking. To better understand the appropriateness of Suarez’s actions, one needs to understand the more fundamental relationship between games and their rules. And it is here that, despite much effort, the field of sport philosophy is still without a satisfactory paradigm that explains game rules. The existing paradigm focuses mainly on a categorical distinction developed by John Searle between constitutive rules that make the convention possible by determining relationships where none existed before, and regulative rules that identify relevant existing relationships and regulate behavior. This constitutive/ regulative categorical distinction has a number of clear uses. It can help us understand the need for rules to define practices like sports. It also indicates that some connection exists between sports and potentially incompatible rule violations. But it still remains unclear whether the constitutive/regulative distinction adequately provides a rough account of game rules or even if it sufficiently explains the relationship between games and their rules. More importantly, can such an account of game rules actually help us to evaluate a player’s behavior in relation to a game’s

Beyond fairness: the ethics of inclusion for transgender and intersex athletes

Abstract Sporting communities remain entangled in debate over whether and how to include transgender and intersex athletes in competition with cisgender athletes. Of particular concern is that transgender and intersex athletes may have unfair physiological advantages over their cisgender opponents. Arguments for inclusion of transgender and intersex athletes in sport attempt to demonstrate that such inclusion does not threaten the presumed physiological equivalence among competitors and is therefore fair to all. This article argues that the physiological equivalency rationale has significant limitations, including an inordinate emphasis on sport as a comparative test. Instead, this article contends that arguments for narrativity rather than physiological equivalency show that exclusion is not only misguided but also undesirable: it is detrimental not only to the excluded athletes but to sport itself. The article yields several important consequences including calls for revisions to policies on transgender and intersex athletes.

The Historical Legacy of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games

Of the post-War Olympics, few burn brighter in the popular memory than the 1984 Los Angeles Games. London in 1948 ensured that the Olympic Games continued after the brutality and destruction of WWII; Japan in 1964 brought the Games to Asia; Mexico City in 1968 and Munich in 1972 provided visible images of protest and tragedy. Aside from a few iconic images, however, those Games fade into the backdrop with a plethora of Olympic moments that have defined a global sporting phenomenon. What explains the enduring images that many still hold towards the Games known as ‘LA84’? In many ways, this seemingly straightforward question defies a clear answer. An important component of the lasting impressions of the 1984 Olympics remains their successes. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games stands as the most profitable and, perhaps for that reason, arguably the most important event in the history of the modern Olympic Movement. Fresh off the back of the terrorist attacks at the Munich Games (1972), the financially disastrous Montreal Games (1976) and the politically controversial Moscow Games (1980), the Olympic Movement returned to the USA for the sixth time in an attempt to salvage the economic viability and global prestige of the Olympics. The Los Angeles Games, despite its financial success, also proved to be both provocative and polarising. On the one hand it has been heralded as an overwhelming, transformative success, ushering the Olympic movement into the modern commercial age. Led by the dynamic and sagacious Peter Ueberroth, the Games set new standards in Olympic commercialism, boasting record-breaking television contracts and corporate sponsorship deals. On the other hand, some scholarly critics have repudiated the Games as a manifestation of commercial excess and a platform for Western political and cultural propaganda. The 1984 Olympic Games recorded unprecedented profits (

Moral Communities in Anti-Doping Policy: A Response to Bowers and Paternoster

232.5 million surplus). For some, Los Angles’ glamour revitalised the flagging Olympic Movement and provided it with a new cultural template that would keep the Olympics relevant in the twenty-first century. However, one cannot deny that the wave of heightened commercialism and professionalisation that followed in its wake diverge from the idealistic vision of International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidents such as Pierre de Coubertin and Avery Brundage. Politics even left an ambiguous, though memorable, legacy. The Soviet Union and 14 of its Communist allies stayed away – though for reasons that will be outlined later. But the absences should not overshadow LA84’s global participation. An impressive 6829 (1566 women, 5263 men) athletes from 140 nations, including the People’s Republic of China and Romania, arrived in the ‘Golden State’ to vie for Olympic glory. Millions of

Sport as meaningful narratives

Abstract This article argues that Bowers and Paternoster’s emphasis on a moral community marks an important step towards a more ethical and effective approach to anti-doping. However, it also argues that the authors’ proposed strategies undermine their stated goal of effectively engaging athletes as partners in anti-doping efforts and raise ethical concerns. Their proposed emphasis on exploiting shaming as a punishment and their general view of athletes as adversaries fosters mistrust between athletes and those who enforce the anti-doping rules. Instead, this article describes a model for empowering athletes as stakeholders in anti-doping policy as a means to provide anti-doping rules with increased moral legitimacy among athletes.

Sex, Drugs, and Kinesiology: A Useful Partnership for Sport’s Most Pressing Issues

Abstract Though many scholars have made claims as to the nature of sport, this article argues that these claims tend to narrowly focus on modern ideas derived primarily from Western competitive sport. Thus, most notions of sport fail to capture how various historical and non-Western cultures valued sport. In an attempt to provide a broader and more durable description of the nature of sport, this article argues that sports are fundamentally about telling a story about ourselves. These stories are meaningful narratives. Meaningful narratives, the article argues, exist in three ways: the individual, the collaborative, and the collective. By seeing sport as inherently about ‘a story we tell ourselves about ourselves’, the article concludes that not only do philosophers realize a more complete understanding of what sport is about but also receive and apply this understanding to normative debates within sport ethics.