Paul Dimeo

Football and Politics in Bengal: Colonialism, Nationalism, Communalism

By his legs you shall know the Bengali. The leg of a free man is straight or a little bandy, so that he can stand on it solidly ... The Bengali’s leg is either skin and bones; the same size all the way down, with knocking knobs for knees, or else it is very fat and globular, also turning in at the knees, with round thighs like a woman’s. The Bengali’s leg is the leg of a slave. G.W. Steevens (journalist, 1899)

Predicting elite Scottish athletes’ attitudes towards doping: examining the contribution of achievement goals and motivational climate

Abstract Understanding athletes’ attitudes to doping continues to be of interest for its potential to contribute to an international anti-doping system. However, little is known about the relationship between elite athletes’ attitudes to drug use and potential explanatory factors, including achievement goals and the motivational climate. In addition, despite specific World Anti-Doping Agency Code relating to team sport athletes, little is known about whether sport type (team or individual) is a risk or protective factor in relation to doping. Elite athletes from Scotland (N = 177) completed a survey examining attitudes to performance-enhancing drug (PED) use, achievement goal orientations and perceived motivational climate. Athletes were generally against doping for performance enhancement. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that task and ego goals and mastery motivational climate were predictors of attitudes to PED use (F (4, 171) = 15.81, P < .01). Compared with individual athletes, team athletes were significantly lower in attitude to PED use and ego orientation scores and significantly higher in perceptions of a mastery motivational climate (Wilks’ lambda = .76, F = 10.89 (5, 170), P < .01). The study provides insight into how individual and situational factors may act as protective and risk factors in doping in sport.

Monitoring drug use in sport: The contrast between official statistics and other evidence

Drug use in sport has a number of defining features with regard to type of drug, policy, behaviours and the collection of evidence. Since the mid-1960s, sports authorities with the support of other Government agencies have attempted to prevent high-level competitive athletes from enhancing their performance with stimulants or enhancing their training with steroids, growth hormones, blood boosters and other related practices known as ‘doping’. This attempted control has been based on establishing a list of banned substances, testing athletes for these and subsequently punishing those found guilty. A number of critics have argued that ‘anti-doping’ policy and testing has consistently failed to stop this form of cheating. Over time, the testing methods have become more sophisticated and the amount of testing has increased, especially since the formation of the World Anti-Doping Agency in 1999 to co-ordinate and improve international activities. This article reviews the testing statistics since then, and contrasts those to the evidence provided by quantitative social science research into prevalence. The extent of doping suggested by the latter is significantly higher than that found in the official statistics. The implications of this will be discussed.

Questions of fairness and anti-doping in US cycling: The contrasting experiences of professionals and amateurs

Abstract The focus of researchers, media and policy on doping in cycling is often limited to the professional level of the sport. However, anti-doping test results since 2001 demonstrate that banned substances are also used by US cyclists at lower levels of the sport, necessitating a broader view of the patterns and motivations of substance use within the sport. In this article, we describe and explain the doping culture that has emerged in domestic US cycling among amateur and semi-professionals. Through analysis of records from sports governing bodies and journalistic reports, we assess the range of violation types and discuss the detection and punishing of riders who were not proven to have intended to cheat but became “collateral damage” in the war on doping. We argue that the phenomenon of doping is more complex than what has been shown to occur in elite sport, as it includes a wider variety of behaviours, situations and motivations. We develop fresh insights by examining cases where doping has been accidental, intrinsically motivated, non-performance enhancing or the result of prescribed medical treatments banned by anti-doping authorities. Such trends call into question the fairness of anti-doping measures, and we discuss the possibility of developing localised solutions to testing and sanctioning amateur athletes.

Why Lance Armstrong? Historical Context and Key Turning Points in the ‘Cleaning Up’ of Professional Cycling

The US Anti-Doping Agency published its evidence against Lance Armstrong in October 2012 after a lengthy investigation and a series of testimonies from his former US Postal Service teammates. This article aims to understand the development processes – local and global – that led eventually to his ‘confession’ in January 2013 on the Oprah Winfrey show. By taking a chronological approach from the 1980s onwards, the following key themes will be addressed: the doping state of play when Armstrong began his career; the incremental confessions of other cyclists that helped break down cyclings secret doping culture; the broader organisational changes in anti-doping; the reasons why Armstrong became the focal point of anti-doping efforts; and the implications for professional cycling and anti-doping in the near future. Thus, the aim is to synthesise macro- and micro-level developments to explain the outcomes, and to further understand the consequences of this ‘scandal’.

The experience of migration for Brazilian football players

The purpose of this paper is to show how the phenomenon of migration in sports is affecting Brazilian football players. This paper aims to provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the migration experience for those players and address how they construct a hybrid and ambiguous identity about themselves and their “family”. Discourses on the experience of migration are fraught with cultural and political anxieties. The classic reactionary position of middle-class Western societies, where ‘white’ is assumed to be the norm, is to agonize over how black people can be assimilated or accommodated; how they can bring economic impetus but not tempt the racist response. Academic studies do not necessarily repeat this fretful construction, but instead focus critical insight upon the struggles of the migrant. We argue the stereotyped versions of Brazilian football players, combined with the structural opportunities, can be seen as a good contrast with other forms of sport migration.

Soccer in South Asia : Empire, Nation, Diaspora

This volume brings together experts from around the world and from the football industry to focus on south Asian football. The book traces the history, achievments and prospects of football both in south Asia and among ex-patriate Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities. The place of football in the colonial and post-colonial past is explored and both British and Portuguese influences on the development of the game are considered. Contemporary issues such as the impact of the professional league in India and the role of UK Asians in the organization of the Indian game are considered. Future scenarios are explored and models for progression and problems facing the sport in south Asia are outlined.

Anti-doping – the end of sport

We will argue that sport is essentially deteriorating under the current anti-doping campaign executed by an un-coordinated alliance between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), law enforcement authorities, sports organizers and the media. We will develop our argument in three steps. We begin with a brief consideration of the fundamental characteristics that define the kind of sport WADA was established to protect. After this, we use the case of cycling to demonstrate the unplanned consequences of the current sanction system and show how it diminishes the meaning of sport before we finish the article by calling for a more rational and level-headed approach which is urgently needed to bring sport out of its current mess.

Saint or sinner?: A reconsideration of the career of Prince Alexandre de Merode, Chair of the International Olympic Committee's Medical Commission, 1967-2002.

This article explores the role of Prince Alexandre de Merode in heading the IOCs fight against drugs from the 1960s to 2002. History has not served de Merode very well. He has been presented in simplistic ways that emerge from context rather than evidence – as either a saint or a sinner. IOC-sanctioned accounts cast him inthe mould of the saint: a moral and intelligent man who saved sports from doping. In contrast, sports academics have tended to portray him as a sinner: an ineffectual leader who did not develop either the testing systems or the punishments required to prevent doping and who deliberately concealed evidence of high-profile doping cases. This article assesses both representations before presenting information to support a richer and more complicated interpretation.

The Anti-Doping Crisis in Sport: Causes, Consequences, Solutions

The Anti-Doping Crisis in Sport is essential reading for those interested in understanding the complicated history of antidoping regulation in contemporary sport. Far more than a chronology, this book is a thoughtful and articulate explication of the problematic state of antidoping institutions, enforcement policies, and testing practices. Unlike many academic treatments of the subject, the authors provide (often provocative) suggestions for how to move antidoping education and enforcement forward toward a more ethical and athlete-centered approach to policy and practice. Paul Dimeo and Verner Møller, both prolific authors whose work has helped shape broader antidoping discourse, intentionally eschew an overly academic treatment of the topic in favor of an accessible and well-reasoned treatise on the problems inherent in the current antidoping movement. The purposefully accessible text is nonetheless exceptionally well referenced, and the major arguments are supported with ample research from the academy. The authors situate the book as helpful to students and scholars of sport studies, as well as those in sporting realms (coaches, doctors, policymakers, etc.) interested in the “politics and ethics of drug use in sport” (p. viii). Ina perfectworld, the target audiencewouldbe those indecision-making roles in the antidoping apparatus, as the coherent critiques of that system presented by Dimeo and Møller are unwavering and backed up with sound and logical reasoning. The book, however, is much more than a takedown of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). True to the subtitle Causes, Consequences, Solutions, the book aims to contextualize the current antidoping moment by helping the reader appreciate the antecedents, including political, economic, and ethical considerations, that led to the development of a more (presumably) impartial antidoping system. The authors argue that the system, which was intended to help promote fair competition and health protections for all athletes, has failed largely on both accounts. Moreover, considering the number of high-profile doping scandals that continue to plague high-level sport and the increase in number of recreational participants who have been caught using performance-enhancing products or techniques, it is no wonder that antidoping is in crisis. Over the course of the book, Dimeo and Møller lay out an argument for the systematic failure of the antidoping system. From problematic science, to a onesize-fits all draconian compliance structure, to the well-documented dehumanization that is required of the system of antidoping as it is currently administered and administrated, the authors paint a compelling picture of a system that is broken