Patrick Mignon

The Tour de France and the doping issue.

The Tour de France’s economic and symbolic importance has turned it into a distorting mirror of how cycling works, particularly regarding doping and its treatment. There are indeed a lot of good reasons that cause one to find doping in the Tour de France because it is such a hard race that it pushes the sport of cycling – more generally – to extremes. But doping is not just taking products to enhance performance or maintain one’s position. It is also a scandal or a social or health problem once these performance-enhancing practices become subject to rules, when a sport decides to ban certain products out of concern for equity between competitors, or once they become subject to the law when the State considers it must ban the consumption of certain products because they are dangerous to individuals’ health or because it gives a bad image to an activity that should set a good example. The relationship of doping and the Tour de France is not simply one that links a demanding competition and the means employed by riders to face up to that. It is one where a sports event, because of its popularity, is a site where the problem will be aired in public. The Tour de France is the occasion when doping is defined and when the array of measures to deal with it will be set in train. It is therefore where the ability of sports governing bodies and political authorities to deal with it and resolve it will be judged, in dramatic fashion.

Risky Behaviours among Young Elite-Student-Athletes

Since the end of the 1980s, ‘youth risky behaviours’ have become a major issue for public health. The relationship between these behaviours and sporting activity is well-documented but still controversial. This article examines some sociological hypotheses related to this relationship, with data from a pilot survey conducted on a sample of 458 elite-student-athletes (ESAs) aged 16–24, gathered and trained in specialized public centres. We found a significant relationship between motives to do sport and ‘risky behaviours’: ESAs who considered sport as a convivial leisure were more prone to use cannabis, while ESAs who mingled sporting and extra-sporting achievements together were more likely to engage in risky behaviours on the road, possibly because they transposed values from the sporting field (speed, competition) into the ‘real world’. Moreover, sporting activity may provide opportunities for drug use with peers as well as incentives to use drugs in order to cope with the anxiety induced by high-level competition. Thus ‘recreational’ drugs may be used as ‘integrative’ drugs.

The under-representation and experiences of elite level minority coaches in professional football in England, France and the Netherlands

This article will examine the previously under-researched area of the under-representation and experiences of elite level minority (male) coaches in (men’s) professional football in Western Europe. More specifically, the article will draw on original interview data with 40 elite level minority coaches in England, France and the Netherlands and identify a series of key constraining factors which have limited the potential for and realization of opportunities for career progression across the transition from playing to coaching in the professional game. In doing so, the article will focus on three main themes identified by interviewees as the most prescient in explaining the ongoing under-representation of minority coaches in the sport: their limited access to and negative experiences of the high level coach education environment; the continued existence of racisms and stereotypes in the professional coaching workplace; and the over-reliance of professional clubs on networks rather than qualifications-based frameworks for coach recruitment. Finally, the article will contextualize these findings from within a critical race theory perspective and will draw clear linkages between patterns of minority coach under-representation, the enactment of processes and practices of institutional racism, and the underlying normative power of hegemonic Whiteness in the sport.