Olivier Aubel

An alternative approach to the prevention of doping in cycling

BACKGROUND Framed by an overly reductionist perspective on doping in professional cycling as an individual moral failing, anti-doping policies tend to envisage a combination of education and repression as the primary intervention strategies. We offer an alternative approach, which seeks to understand doping practices as embedded in social relations, especially in relation to team organisation and employment conditions. METHODS We undertake an in-depth analysis of the functioning of nine of the 40 world professional cycling teams, and the careers of the 2,351 riders who were or have been professionals since 2005. RESULTS We find that anti-doping approaches rest upon questionable assumptions of doping as an individual moral fault, and have not produced the anti-doping effects expected or intended. Based on an analysis of team practices, and the ways in which riders produce their achievements, we offer an alternative perspective which emphasises doping as a product of social-economic condition. Our findings emphasise employment and business models, as well as day-to-day working conditions, as structural drivers of doping practices in which individuals and teams engage. CONCLUSION Anti-doping requires structural as well as cultural change within the sport of professional cycling, especially in the ways teams function economically.

The denegation of the economy - the example of climbing in France.

Free-climbing is used as a privileged way of studying the positioning generated by the meeting of the symbolic economy of sport and a market that is trying to extend its hold on it. In order to understand why money has become an internal problem to the free-climbing space, the article analyses how its symbolic economy and its market are organized. As the economization of free-climbing took place almost simultaneously with its advent, free-climbers had to take an immediate stand. At the end of the 1980s, nearly 25 years after the establishment of free-climbing, opposition to its marketization was still strong among its enthusiasts because the symbolic economy of the free-climbing world was at stake. Free-climbers use the denegation of the economy to overcome the contradictions between their anti-economic ethos and the marketing of their performances, while at the same time expressing the values of the social categories to which the sportsmen and sportswomen belong. Thus, denegation is not a conscious way of being close to the climbing culture; it underlines the beliefs that in climbing value does not, as in some other social spaces, depend on the individual’s economic capital but on free-climbing culture.

The comparability of quantitative surveys on sport participation in France (1967–2010)

Results from quantitative surveys enable historians, sociologists and demographers to describe and analyse the evolution of sport participation in France from 1967 to 2010. However, most of these social scientists use the results of these surveys to create very different methodologies without having studied the surveys’ empirical data or databases. In this article, we demonstrate how we have attempted to establish a basis for comparability of the surveys by analysing these databases. As a result of our work, certain affirmations on which the history of sport participation in France has long been based may be called into question or even changed. This comparison raises the question of the distinction between the work of statisticians on the one hand, and that of historians, sociologists and demographers on the other.

Doping Risk and Career Turning Points in Male Elite Road Cycling (2005–2016)

OBJECTIVES Determine whether career paths of elite male professional riders explain the risk of being sanctioned for an Anti-Doping Rules Violation through the International Cycling Union. DESIGN, METHODS A discrete-time logit model explored the link between career path and ADRV risk in a database of 10,551 riders engaged in the first three world divisions (2005-2016), including 271 sanctioned riders. RESULTS Despite a longer career (7.8years), sanctioned riders have a precarious path. The odds of finding a sanctioned rider within those who experienced a career interruption is 5.80 times higher than for a non-caught one. 61% of the caught riders have experienced a team change. The odds of finding a caught rider within those who experienced such a change is 1.35 times higher. 44% of caught riders start before 23years, vs 34% for non-sanctioned ones. The odds of being sanctioned are 1.69 times higher for doped riders beginning before 23. The odds of finding a sanctioned rider are 1.94 times higher among those starting their careers before 2005 (establishment of Pro Tour), than those who started in 2008 or after. In that year, the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation and the biologic passport were both launched. CONCLUSIONS Caught riders could have extended their more precarious careers with doping. The post-2005 generation effect could mean that riders are cleaner or slicker at hiding doping. The higher risk of being caught for riders starting after 23 might indicate that an early professional socialization reduces the risk by teaching them to be cleaner, or better at hiding doping.