Sarah Teetzel

No Net Gain: A critique of media representations of women's Olympic beach volleyball

Representations of women athletes have always been complicated and often controversial (Paul Davis 2010), but perhaps none more so than in the case of beach volleyball. Current media representations of beach volleyball confine the players to established gender roles— sexual object or mother—and recent uniform rule modifications do nothing to change that state of affairs. In 1996, the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) added beach volleyball as a second volleyball discipline at the Olympic Games. Since its inception as an Olympic sport, the FIVB, in conjunction with the host city organizing committee, has determined the uniform requirements. For example, the 2004 edition of the FIVB’s Olympic Beach Volleyball Tournaments Specific Competition Regulations, which governed the women’s and men’s beach volleyball tournaments at the Olympic Games in Athens, described the women’s required uniforms:

Rules and reform: eligibility, gender differences, and the Olympic Games

Since the beginning of the modern Olympic Games, women have struggled to participate as equals. One important aspect of womens struggle for inclusion involves the rules of eligibility to compete in the Olympic Games. This article examines the current status of women in the ‘reformed’ Olympic Movement by considering the number of events in which women participate, the nature or duration of those events, the number of competitive opportunities available to women and the language used by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the International Federations (IFs) to refer to men and women. A content analysis of the eligibility rules of participation found that the Olympic Charter and the rulebooks of eight IFs stipulate differential treatment of women. The article argues that these rules mandate and normalize inequitable treatment, and thus create inequitable opportunities for female athletes. The inequality that these rules perpetuate demonstrates that the IOCs reform process is not yet complete.

The Onus of Inclusivity: Sport Policies and the Enforcement of the Women’s Category in Sport

With recent controversies surrounding the eligibility of athletes with disorders of sex development (DSD) and hyperandrogenism, as well as continued discussion of the conditions transgender athletes must meet to compete in high-performance sport, a wide array of scholars representing a diverse range of disciplines have weighed in on both the appropriateness of classifying athletes into the female and male categories and the best practices of doing so. In response to cases of high-profile athletes’ sex (and gender) being called into question, the International Olympic Committee, the International Association of Athletics Federations, and the National Collegiate Athletics Association, among others, published or updated policies addressing who is eligible to compete in the women’s sport category and under what conditions. This paper addresses the areas in which philosophical reasoning and ethical analysis can contribute to reopened debates about the surveillance of the women’s category in sport. Emphasis is placed on determining where the onus of responsibility should fall for ensuring the new policies are followed.

Optimizing Olympic education: a comprehensive approach to understanding and teaching the philosophy of Olympism

Through an examination and clarification of the philosophy of Olympism, this paper analyses the appropriateness of using Olympism as a mechanism of teaching values and intercultural respect through sport to students. From a review of the literature on Olympism, three themes emerged as common to most conceptions: 1) fairness, 2) equality, and 3) ethical behaviour. These three components of Olympism are analysed in turn to show that each one has had problematic associations throughout its application in sport. Consequently, when educators employ Olympic education programmes that focus on the philosophy of Olympism as a means of teaching ethics and values in sport, they are advised to avoid perpetuating the belief that all aspects of the Olympic Games are going to be equitable, fair, and ethical; instead they are cautioned to introduce and engage in discussions with students about Olympism and the Olympic values in more critical and nuanced ways.

Lentius, Inferius, Debilius: the ethics of ‘not trying’ on the Olympic stage

This article examines whether elite athletes have an ethical obligation always to try their best, especially when representing their countries at the Olympic Games. Through an analysis of cases of athletes failing to try their best at the London 2012 Olympics, this paper analyses the moral acceptability of not trying. By applying the sport ethics literature on personal bests, duties to ones self, and game flaws, this article distinguishes when failing to try ones best can be considered a legitimate strategy in line with the ethos of the game, and when failing to try should be condemned.

Prescription for “Sports Medicine and Ethics”

While Testoni, Hornik, Smith, Benjamin, and McKinney (2013) do a good job of identifying ethical questions raised in sports medicine, we suggest three areas in which their analysis needs supplementation. First, the authors’ discussion of autonomy needs to be more robust, most crucially concerning what counts as autonomous decision making, particularly in the context of external pressures. The authors neglect to include the significant and extensive sport philosophy literature on sports medicine and ethics, which contains considerable analysis of several of the questions the authors pose. A final gap the article does not address in detail regards the doping-related obligations for team physicians working with sports federations and leagues that are signatories of the World Anti-Doping Agency Code (WADA Code) and thus held to additional standards and requirements. Although Testoni and colleagues consider at length issues of autonomy and informed consent, there are significant gaps in their discussion, stemming from a lack of acknowledgment of how ethical decision making has been analyzed in the medical context. The authors presume the existence of a standard and static definition of autonomy, suggesting that true autonomy requires the absence of “controlling influences,” and go on to identify elements of the sporting environment that might count as such. An immediate, but not fatal, objection is that more than once the authors’ examples involve a high school student, but high school students are not granted the same rights as adults. Thus, the question of the desires of the student may be irrelevant, or at least not decisive, as we would generally defer medical decision making to a parent or legal guardian. Setting this to the side, the discussion of autonomy and controlling influence suffers from an omission of important issues that have been given extensive attention in the field. First, the conception of autonomy as a capacity that is possessed and exercised by atomistic individuals has been challenged by those who think it more accurate to characterize individuals as embedded in and defined by relationships. Tauber, for example, suggests this view in which “autonomy shifts from an expression of radical selfgovernance in a world organized and determined by the individual, to one in which individual actions are decided and constituted within a universe of complex social inter-

Cheating, lying, and trying in recreational sports and leisure practices

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the ethics of rule breaking, lying, and failing to try one’s best in recreational sports and leisure activities. Foundational philosophical arguments regarding the ethics of cheating, lying, and failing to try by Scott Kretchmar, Robert Simon, and Sissela Bok are applied to cases of seemingly unethical behaviour in leisure practices. Three specific scenarios are addressed: (1) recreational-level participants who intentionally break rules, (2) participants who exaggerate their performances, and (3) participants who appear more concerned with collecting medals and ensuring selfies are taken than with putting forth significant effort. The resulting philosophical analysis addresses why cheating, lying, and sandbagging can be tolerated as part of the ethos of some leisure activities while being disdained in others, and what, if anything, is morally wrong about cheating, lying and not trying one’s best during recreational sports and leisure practices.

Drug Testing, Sex Verification, and the 1967 Pan-American Games

Abstract Despite frequent claims that invasive methods of sex verification and early procedures for doping detection were used in 1966 and 1967 at different major international sport competitions, little is known about the origins and rationales for implementing such procedures. This paper focuses on the drug testing and sex verification protocols implemented at the 1967 Pan-American Games held in Winnipeg. Specifically, it explores the conditions that led to these protocols, as well as the details of and the arguments invoked for their implementation. To do so, archival material, media coverage featured in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish newspapers and magazines across the Americas, and oral histories are analyzed and discussed. The paper demonstrates that neither the sex verification nor the drug testing protocol was mandatory for all athletes and only two very specific groups of athletes were targeted. It also demonstrates that in the case of the former, exceptions were made within the specific group targeted. The paper concludes that the rudimentary protocols applied at the 1967 Pan-American Games likely informed the IOC Medical Commission’s doping and sex-testing policies implemented at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and Grenoble Winter Olympics.

Race and Sport in Canada: Intersecting Inequalities

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