Drugs, sport and ideologies

Ivan Waddington

Patrick Murphy

pp. 36-64

in: Eric Dunning, Chris Rojek (eds), Sport and leisure in the civilizing process, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1992

Abstract

In November 1989 Steve Pinsent, a British former Commonwealth Games weightlifting champion, was jailed for three months at Aylesbury Crown Court, near London, for supplying anabolic steroids. In passing sentence, Judge Morton Jack told Pinsent (The Times, 18 November 1989) that the use of drugs in sport to improve performances "is an evil which is prevalent and growing". Judge Jack's comment nicely points up two of the three interrelated issues which form the subject matter of this paper. The first of these concerns the question of whether the use of drugs in sport is indeed "prevalent and growing". The second problem to be examined arises from the fact that what is often described as "drug abuse" in sport frequently arouses strong and immediate condemnation — as expressed, for example, in Judge Jack's use of the word "evil" — and that this condemnation is frequently accompanied by demands for swingeing punishments, such as life bans, for athletes found guilty of using prohibited substances. But what is the basis of this opposition to the use of drugs in sport? In seeking to answer this apparently simple question, not from a moralistic but from a sociological perspective, we may be able to shed light on some aspects of the development and contemporary structure of modern sport. The third and final issue of this chapter is to examine some of the major processes, both within sport and within the structure of the wider society, which have been associated with the use of drugs in recent years.