Drug use and Deviant Overconformity Jay Coakley

The use of banned substances continues in high performance sports despite control efforts by sport
governing bodies and official testing organizations, such as WADA and USADA. The use of
banned and other substances does not occur in a vacuum, nor does it occur as a choice young
people become elite athletes, and this context includes relationships and external expectations that
shape the training, body maintenance, skill development, and competitive readiness.
Doctors, physiologists, sport medicine personnel, and pharmacologists are part of a federation-
based context and often control when, how often, and how much substances are taken in
connection with closely regulated training and competition schedules. Advice also comes from
athlete-peers, usually in the same sport but not exclusively so.
Coaches are influential in that they articulate their expectations of what athletes must do to remain
on a team or in a sport. Sponsors, too, are influential in that they often set performance standards
and expectations as conditions of their continued support of athletes and teams. Media companies
often work with sponsors and federations to set competition schedules associated with media rights
fees.
When the forces generated in this context are combined with the sport-focused identities of
athletes, their commitment to participation, and the exhilaration associated with sport experiences,
using substances to maximize performance becomes a normalized component of surviving and
succeeding in a sport. This emphasis on the connection between action, experience, identity, and
context is the focus of my sociological approach to drug use in sports. My analysis is not reducible
to explain solely in terms of individual athletes pursuing self-interest and external rewards.
This analysis is not meant to excuse, approve, or condemn the use of performance-enhancing
substances by elite athletes. Instead, it seeks to highlight the social processes and contexts in which
usage occurs. This enables us to more fully understand the challenge of organizing sports so that
the health and well-being of athletes is not systematically and permanently damaged in a quest to
develop skills and achieve performance goals—especially for the sake of entertaining spectators
and providing financial profits for those with something less than their physical health and well-
being at stake.
Analytical vantage point
As a member of the faculty at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs from 1972 until
2005 I had the opportunity to observe the establishment and growth of the United States Olympic
Committee (USOC) and the U.S. Olympic Training Center (USOTC). The USOC was established
by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1978 (the Amateur Sports Act), and the USOTC has become an
important location for athlete training in more than 20 sports.
Athletes from the training center occasionally took my on-campus sociology of sport course, and
I to accommodate the training and competition schedules of the athletes.
Beginning in the mid1980s I had regular discussions with the athletes from different sports about
the substances they took in connection with their training. I occasionally accompanied them as

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they visited a local wholesale distributor that sold a wide range of what were believed to be
performance-enhancing supplements, most of which were not on the IOC’s banned substance list
at the time.
My colleague and co-director of the Center for the Study of Sport and Leisure at the university
was the late Ed Burke, a former member of the USA Cycling team medical staff who worked with
athletes during the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Burke was personally involved in the
U.S. cycling blood boosting scandal and was sanctioned for the part he played. He also had
extensive knowledge of how athletes worldwide were using various supplements, compounds, and
drugs to train with greater intensity and regularity, and to boost their performances during
competitions.
My contacts in Colorado Springs also included an entrepreneurial pharmacist who had a mail-
order business through which he sold numerous compounds and drugs to people worldwide. This
pharmacist was a neighbor, and during the late 1980s he became a close acquaintance as I
personally dealt with symptoms caused by multiple sclerosis. At that time, I learned that he was
an expert in creating medical needs and conditions.
Although he owned and operated a local pharmacy for nearly 30 years, his global compounding
business was a multi-million dollar operation employing over a dozen pharmacists in a local lab
and mail-order shipping center. After operating this business for over 25 years, he was arrested for
creating, importing, and selling anabolic steroids and human growth hormones. He was sentenced
to 40 months in prison and forfeited over $5 million in assets (United States District Attorney’s
Office, 2010).
Knowing that elite athletes of all ages were using or seeking performance-enhancing substances
from this and other sources led my colleague—sociologist and former football coach Robert
Hughes—and me to informally collect information about the contexts in which athletes used them.
This was not a formal research project. Athletes would not have talked with us under such
conditions, and the university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) would have frowned on
gathering data about the use of substances that might be illegal and/or dangerous to health and
well-being.
Over nearly three years (1987–1990) we had numerous conversations with amateur and
professional athletes as well as coaches, team trainers, and physiologists. Instead of asking direct
questions about the use of substances we sought descriptions of sport participation experiences
and the organization of elite sport programs that would help us understand decisions to use these
substances. We in high-performance sports. Synthesizing this information led us to develop the
concept of the “sport ethic”—an interrelated set of norms or expectations that was (and continues
to be) widely used to guide and evaluate ideas, traits, actions, and participants in prolympic sports.
Our synthesis led us to conclude that the following four expectations constituted the normative
core of the sport ethic (Hughes and Coakley, 1991):
A prolympic athlete must

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1. be dedicated to “the game . ” A willingness to make sacrifices and subordinate all other interests
to play their sport is a prerequisite in prolympic sports. Meeting this expectation is the mark of a
bona fide athlete, and it elicits recognition and identity reaffirmation from athlete peers and
coaches;
2. strive for distinction . A constant focus on self-improvement and reaching perfection is expected.
This requires that prolympic athletes do all they can to climb the pyramid of ever-increasing
competitive challenges in their sport as they sustain a ceaseless quest to excel;
3. accept risks and play through pain . To face pressure, overcome fear, and endure pain without
and coaches. Failing to do so is defined as a personal flaw that precludes identity reaffirmation and
elicits marginalization, if not exclusion from elite sports;
4. overcome all obstacles in the pursuit of possibilities . Overcoming barriers and believing in the
possibility of success is a key expectation. To abandon the dream of being an athlete or reaching
one’s potential leads to a withdrawal of support from athlete peers and others in prolympic sports.
Each of these norms is central in the process of defining, identifying, and evaluating athletes in the
culture of prolympic sports. Conformity to these norms is not only expected but demanded for
recognition and acceptance as a real athlete and continuing team membership.
Building on this concept, Hughes and I created a framework for explaining the use of performance-
enhancing substances in prolympic sports and why usage is so difficult to control. Our initial
explanation (Hughes and Coakley, 1991) was not stated clearly enough to avoid occasional
misinterpretations over the past quarter century. Therefore, one of the goals of this discussion is to
clarify and expand our explanatory framework.
The sport ethic and deviant overconformity
Bob Hughes and I assumed that sport participation, even in prolympic sports, was a voluntary act.
3 It was neither required nor expected in most social worlds, and choosing not to participate was
unlikely to elicit negative sanctions or diminish overall life chances.
Because sport participation was based on a voluntary commitment it was likely that the experience
of participation was perceived by athletes to be pleasurable and self-reaffirming. This was certainly
clear in the data that Hughes and I used to understand sport experiences from an athlete
perspective. For those making this commitment, being an athlete was a source of challenge and
excitement as well as a socially meaningful identity that was central to their overall sense of self.
At the same time, the only way to sustain participation, excitement, and reaffirmation was to train
and compete under the conditions required by their sport. As a result, remaining in prolympic sport
was the primary goal of the athletes with whom we talked.
Participation and survival in prolympic sports during the late 1980s required an acceptance of the
sport ethic and conformity to its norms. But we also found that athletes were so dedicated to
following these norms that they seldom identified limits to their conformity. In fact, their actions
often fell into a category that would be perceived this overconformity as a condition of team
membership and identity reaffirmation as real athletes.

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This willingness to overconform to the norms of the sport ethic was partly fueled by the pleasure
and excitement of participation, but athletes also knew that it increased their chances of staying
involved in their sport and progressing to higher levels of competition. The possibility that
overconformity could endanger their health and well-being was generally dismissed as an
unavoidable fact of life in prolympic sports.
In societies where prolympic sports were highly visible and popular, the norms of the sport ethic
were widely accepted as reasonable. Being dedicated to a socially valued activity, striving for
distinction, facing and coming to terms with one’s fears, enduring pain to achieve goals, and
overcoming obstacles in the pursuit of possibilities were mainstream expectations that parents had
for their children and teachers had for students in post-industrial societies. Instilling the desire and
ability to meet these expectations was part of normal socialization in societies where prolympic
sports were highly valued and seen as contexts for the development of positive character traits. In
fact, most people reading this paper have tried to prepare their children or students to follow these
norms as a part of normal development.
To ignore, reject, or not live by these norms was generally perceived and violated general
expectations in a society or a particular social world. As such, they were usually met and controlled
with negative sanctions. Pervasive underconformity could lead to anarchy and was generally seen
in negative terms in the wider society, and certainly by coaches and administrators when it
occurred in prolympic sports.
Those who lacked dedication, were unwilling to sacrifice, failed to strive for improvement,
avoided risks, refused to play through pain, or withdrew in the face of barriers, would be
marginalized by other athletes and dismissed by coaches in prolympic sports. Such characteristics
and actions were seen to disrespect sport and its participants, undermine the challenge and
excitement of participation, and erode the normative foundation of prolympic sports.
Hughes and I realized that existing theories in sociology and criminology offered multiple
explanations of deviant underconformity. Such “negative deviance” undermined social order and
led to anarchy, so it had been widely studied and theorized. But the same could not be said for
deviant overconformity, or actions that exceeded normative expectations to the point that people
no longer set limits when conforming to norms. Such “positive deviance” was (and continues to
be) treated as an oxymoron in sociology and criminology. Most scholars in these fields refuse to
consider as deviant sanctions (Goode, 1991; Sagarin, 1985).
However, as we considered this issue, we knew that widespread positive deviance or
overconformity was negatively sanctioned when it took the form of moral righteousness, although
sanctions were administered informally rather than formally, because moral righteousness was
seldom defined as illegal or criminal. We also knew that extreme overconformity had led to
inhumane forms of fascism and imperialism, phenomena explored in the controversial work of
political theorist Hannah Arendt (1963; 1968). But this form of deviance, despite its sociological
and political importance, had not been thoroughly explored or theorized in sociology.
Normative overconformity presented an analytical challenge for theories of deviance. On the one
hand, viewing normative overconformity from an outsider’s perspective—such as witnessing blind

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and unbending commitment to an ideology or the directives of a charismatic leader to the point of
risking harm to self and others—was generally perceived as deviant and appropriately controlled
through negative sanctions. On the other hand, when the same forms of overconformity were
viewed from the perspective of those uncritically committed to an ideology or the directives of a
leader, they were seen as praiseworthy, even heroic. Such actions were defined by insiders as signs
of loyalty to collective ideals that transcended individual the moral embodiment of a team or group.
Deviant overconformity and prolympic sports
Overconformity also presented analytical and theoretical challenges in the sociology of sport and
to all those concerned with social control in prolympic sports. Under normal circumstances it was
defined as deviant if a person turned away from friendships and family to train obsessively in a
highly specialized, unproductive physical activity, even though most people valued achievement
orientation as a positive trait. Additionally, most people defined as deviant an obsessive focus on
self, the endurance of pain and injuries for the sake of a game, and refusing to abandon sport
dreams when confronted with real and practical barriers.
At the same time, there was widespread ambivalence about negatively sanctioning such forms of
deviance because people often idealized prolympic sports, saw them as essentially pure and good,
and viewed the overconformity of athletes as entertaining. They also saw overconformity as useful
in achieving victories, championships, and performance records. Because these actions were
supranormal rather than subnormal people responded with awe, and with ambivalence about
negatively sanctioning them.
Few people ever saw the negative consequences of overconformity in prolympic sports, which
made it easier to “excuse” them, despite seeing them as deviant. People didn’t see the self-
indulgent training that destroyed relationships, the obsessions that foreclosed other opportunities,
the chronic pain and disability, the bodies worn down by overuse, and the depression caused by
an unquestioned pursuit of impossible dreams. Unaware of these consequences, people viewed
overconformity in sports as supranormal displays of character, which clearly supported their
mythical belief in the essential purity and goodness of sport and the positive impact on those who
participate in it (Coakley, 2015).
In our conversations with athletes in prolympic sports there was little moral ambivalence about
overconformity. Conforming to the norms of the sport ethic was expected, and overconformity
was seen as setting athletes apart as exemplars. Overconformity was viewed as a sign of dedication,
commitment to achieving excellence, a willingness to put the game and the team ahead of personal
well-being, and a refusal to forsake the pursuit of possibilities even when obstacles appeared
insurmountable. Therefore, this form of ‘positive deviance’ elicited identity reaffirmations from
athlete-peers, legitimized one’s place among elite athletes, accorded them moral standing in the
general community, and increased the chances of remaining in the sport that brought them joy,
excitement, and personal meaning.
Finally, prolympic athletes realized battle-forged bonds with their peers, and none of the joy and
excitement of living on the edge and pushing the limits of their bodies in ways that separated them

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from ‘normal’ people and placed them in a select collection of human beings. This served as the
context in which deviant overconformity was normalized.
As Bob Hughes and I tried to explain performance-enhancing drug use among the athletes we met,
we concluded that it was very different from the drug use of people who ignored, resisted, or
rejected mainstream norms. The athletes accepted mainstream norms. They believed the normative
mottos and slogans that coaches hung on locker room walls. They were committed to intense and
arduous training. They knew that to be a prolympic athlete involved a constant struggle, and they
were willing to set no limits as they put their bodies on the line to stay in their sports and honor
the ethic that governed them. Their use of nutritional supplements and other substances thought to
facilitate more intense training and improve performance was not based on indifference to or
rejection of norms. Instead, it was based on the unquestioned acceptance of the norms that
constituted the sport ethic, along with a willingness to forsake the limits of conformity that would
constrain the actions of normal people. Overall, using those substances was seen as a necessary
component of training and competition.
The point here is that these athletes and hGH, among other substances, for reasons that differed
greatly from criminal drug users. A 25-year old who had withdrawn from or rejected society and
used drugs to escape reality was clearly engaging in subnormal action—that is, deviant
underconformity. But athletes using performance-enhancing drugs accepted norms about
dedication, hard work, and overcoming obstacles to reach goals. They conformed to them without
question, qualification, or limits. Within the context of prolympic sports, using performance-
enhancing substances and a range of emerging training technologies were seen as supranormal
actions that enabled them to stay involved in the sport that provided them with meaning,
excitement, and identity.
The athletes we met did not use performance-enhancing substances (PESs) to escape reality as
much as they used them to survive and succeed in the sport reality in which they were living. For
Hughes and me, this begged for a new approach to explaining drug use in sports. The explanations
and methods of control used to deal with people who ignored or rejected norms and used illegal
drugs were not relevant when trying to explain the use of banned or dangerous PESs in sports.
Our conversations led us to conclude that PES use among these athletes was not caused by
defective socialization or a lack of moral character. It usually occurred among the most dedicated,
committed, and in overconformity— the same type of overconformity that occurred when distance
runners trained with serious stress fractures, when female gymnasts controlled weight by cutting
food consumption to dangerous levels, and when NFL players took injections of painkilling drugs
so they could put their already injured bodies on the line week after painful week for the sake of
their team and the sport to which they had committed themselves.
Our hypothesis was that sports provided such powerful and memorable experiences that many
athletes were willing to set no limits in what they did to maintain participation and sustain identities
as members of a select group sharing lives characterized by intensity, challenge, and excitement.
To set limits on conformity was never an option for many of the athletes. They knew that such a

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decision, regardless of their skills, would lead them to be marginalized and perceived as unwilling
to do what it takes to maximize their performance.
This willingness to set no limits was often seen by the general public, fans, media commentators,
sports journalists, and even sport scientists as an individual obsession to “win at all costs” or to
gain money and fame. But Hughes and I saw this rhetoric as obscuring two key facts:
1. Being an athlete held deep personal meaning for participants in prolympic sports, and athlete
peers was their most important measure of success.
Training and competition in prolympic sports had become an intense, full-time activity that
precluded other commitments and caused athletes to seek support from nutritionists, psychologists,
physiologists, medical doctors, pharmacologists, and other experts to stay involved at an elite level
of participation.
These facts were difficult for athletes to explain to outsiders—or they preferred not to explain
them, so they often gave rehearsed lip service to the importance and glory of winning when
interacting with media people or fans. But when we had talked with athletes it was clear that
winning for them symbolized improvement and established distinction. It also legitimized their
sacrifices, gave meaning to their overconformity, enabled them to continue playing the sport they
loved, and generally insured reaffirmation of the identity that was at the core of their self-concepts.
At the same time, losing was feared because it would lead to the termination of their careers and
loss of reaffirmation for their athlete identity.
Winning was important, but the athletes with whom we talked realized that there were few
competitive winners (that is, champions, victors, record holders) in deserving inclusion in their
midst. This is why athletes who knew they would never be individual champions, set records, or
even be named to starting teams engaged in deviant overconformity, including the use of
performance-enhancing substances. They knew that they would never gain fame or wealth by
playing their sport, but the experiential and social identity stakes of their participation were more
important than other rewards.
This connection between identity, action, and deviant overconformity was the centerpiece of our
sociological explanation of performance-enhancing substance use in prolympic sports. We
consciously avoided a reductionist approach in which this form of deviance, including the use of
PESs, was explained in terms of individual greed and a quest for victories. Our key point was that
deviant overconformity was grounded in the relationships and culture that normalized pushing the
limits of accepted norms as a requisite for identity reaffirmation and continued participation in an
activity that provided meaning and pleasure.
Deviant overconformity as a variable
In our original discussion, Hughes and I never intended to imply that deviant overconformity
occurred and the extent to which athletes sought identity reaffirmation from their peers. In fact,
we offered two hypotheses to explain the variability of deviant overconformity and I subsequently
added a third. In summary, athletes most likely to overconform were the following:

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1. those with low global self-esteem and a strong associated need to be accepted as real athletes by
their peers in sport;
2. those who perceive achievement in sports as the surest way to be defined as successful and gain
the respect of others;
3. those who linked their identity as an athlete to their masculinity so that being an athlete and
being a man were merged into a single identity.
These hypotheses have not been thoroughly tested, as far as I know. However, when Hughes and
I wrote our original article we knew of coaches who created team environments that fixed athletes
in a perpetual state of adolescence—a stage of development characterized by identity insecurities
and a strong dependence on coach and peer acceptance—in the hope that this would lead their
athletes to set no limits to their overconformity in an effort to gain identity reaffirmation and
eliminate self-doubts. For male athletes, many of these coaches would also raise questions about
masculinity to accomplish the same purpose. Our most notable oversight when discussing deviant
overconformity as a variable was that we did not explicitly identify the influential changes that
were occurring in prolympic sports during the late 1980s (Waddington and Smith, 2009). As others
have noted, these included increases in the following:
 high profile media coverage and lucrative corporate sponsorships;
 the visibility and cultural importance of sports;
 the stakes associated with sports and competitive success in sports;
 the use of medical, pharmaceutical, and sport sciences to enhance the effectiveness of
training and the level of performance in competition;
 national and organizational funding priorities that rewarded winning and punished losing;
 opportunities for some elite athletes to benefit financially and gain global status if they
performed well;
 the intensity of year-round training required for team membership and success;
 the number and importance of revenue-generating competitive events, and requirements to
participate in them;
 the need to shorten media companies, and sport federations;
 the commodity status of athletes and the resulting external control over their bodies and
lives in general;
 the extent to which athletes depended on external support to sustain prolympic
participation;
 the availability of substances presented as, believed to be, or proved to be useful training
aids and/or performance enhancers in one or more sports.
We were viewing deviant overconformity on the front edge of these changes. We overlooked some
of them and underestimated the influence of others. We knew that the emerging governance and
organizational structure of sports, especially commercial sports, was beginning to exert pervasive
year-round control over the lives of athletes, but we did not describe this in our analysis.

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In retrospect, it is easy to see that this control extended into the everyday lives of athletes as well
as their training and competition (Beamish and Ritchie, 2006). It also raised questions about
athletes’ rights, their vulnerability to manipulation and exploitation, and the range of realistic
choices available to them in their careers. Most safety and security issues were increasingly
controlled by others as athletes trained and competed. The intensity and constancy of their sport
participation often separated them from sources of support and advice that were outside the culture
and organizational context in which they lived nearly all of their lives. As we should have
observed, this made them more vulnerable to group expectations and to pushing the normative
limits of the sport ethic to gain support and reaffirmation.
The athletes with whom we talked were mostly “amateurs,” but not the “lady and gentlemen
amateurs” of the romanticized past. They had made full-time commitments to their sports and most
lacked resources to do much more than train and compete. The regulations relating to amateur
status had been relaxed by governing bodies but not yet eliminated. This also kept many of the
athletes in a relatively vulnerable situation.
It was in this overall context that athletes experimented with supplements, compounds, and drugs.
But most of those who talked with us did not see this as cheating or as (negative) deviance as much
as an attempt to continue doing what they loved to do. Some saw it as risky and daring—something
that required “guts.” Others described it simply as a necessary part of training and competing.
Some—we never felt comfortable putting a percentage figure on it— were suspicious of the
benefits and determined to stay away from all but the most basic supplements because they thought
that “drug use” was cheating, a violation of rules, too risky, or antithetical to “what sport was all
about.”
In any case, there was no shortage of information about using a wide in Colorado Springs during
the late 1980s. This information was based on personal experiences, anecdotes, a few scientific
studies, and the “informed hunches” of experts in sport science, medicine, and pharmacology. This
information, along with assistance and advice, came from within sport organizations and as well
as other sources.
Controlling “drug” use in sports
Our explanation of drug use as a form of deviant overconformity was developed a decade before
the existence of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and at least 15 years before the
implementation of the World Anti-Doping Code and the UNESCO International Convention
against Doping in Sport. Even the Anti-Doping Convention of the Council of Europe did not open
for signatures until the end of 1989.
We knew that the combined lack of regulation and scientifically informed guidance put athletes
into a danger zone as they used various combinations of substances, many of which had never been
combined or taken in the dosages being used. Although most of the athletes were concerned about
using certain substances, they gradually came to see them as a necessary part of training. In many
cases, they believed that the substances enabled them to increase the intensity and duration of their
workouts without compromising their readiness to perform at peak to teams and training centers,
and technical rationality became the foundation for nearly all prolympic sport participation.

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The testing technology used during this time was basic, and all but the most careless or naïve
athletes learned how to avoid positive tests. They strategically stacked, cycled, and timed the use
of banned substances, used masking agents, and took substances not (yet) banned or detectable.
Additionally, tests were administered by sport organizations leading to conflict of interest issues
and certainly compromising the validity and reliability of the testing. The athletes knew that testing
was ineffective and that the “drug warnings” coming from officials were hypocritical or based on
rumor and moral panic.
The increasing stakes associated with sports and competitive outcomes led many people, in
addition to the athletes, to seek new forms of performance enhancement. These included those
who developed PESs and the sponsors and media companies using sports to increase profits.
Although people used a self-righteous rhetoric of social control when discussing drug use by
athletes, there were multiple vested interests in the constant improvement of athlete performances
in prolympic sports.
Our contention in the 1991 article published in the Sociology of Sport Journal was that forms of
deviant overconformity could not be controlled without changing the top priority, with support
and training for setting limits on the extent of their conformity to the norms of the sport ethic.
Standard approaches to social control, we concluded, were destined to fail and even lead athletes
to seek new forms of performance enhancement that might be more dangerous and difficult to
detect. Without such changes, athletes would not abandon forms of training that enabled them to
continue participating in the sports around which their entire lives—relationships, experiences,
and everyday decisions and routines—had been organized.
We tried to point out that in prolympic sports, playing the game was much more than what athletes
did—rather, it was who they were . Therefore, it was erroneous to assume that a personal obsession
with winning was what drove athletes to push themselves beyond normative boundaries. Of course,
winning, money, and fame were, and remain, important to athletes, but these rewards were and
continue to be secondary to reaffirming the identity at the core of their existence. For us, this meant
that the oft repeated rhetoric about a desire to “ win at all costs” as the primary motive among
prolympic athletes was a smokescreen obscuring the deeper issues that influenced the decisions
and actions of athletes in societies where sports were highly visible and socially significant cultural
activities.
As Socrates, captain of Brazil’s 1982 World Cup team proclaimed, “Victory is secondary. What
matters he stated, “You do whatever it takes to play … You get hurt, you find a way. … You just
suck it up and push through, and if you can’t, you’re out” (in Leahy, 2008: W08). An NBA player
who had won multiple championships explained that when people expect you to win, “Winning
was just a relief”; the real goal was to avoid losing (Associated Press, 2014).
Finally, if winning were the primary goal of prolympic athletes, why haven’t drug users been
reported by those who would benefit from their disqualification? This issue has not been explored
in research. But the answer may be that disclosing drug use would have precluded the whistle
blowers’ membership in the only context in which their identity could be meaningfully reaffirmed.
Additionally, it might have been perceived by peers as a sign that they were unwilling to make the

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sacrifices necessary to be real prolympic athletes. Overall, it may have been more important for
potential whistle blowers to continue doing what they had sacrificed so much to do than to report
their drug-using peers and jeopardize their own identities and experiences and the status of their
sports in society. Risking these things to win or “preserve the spirit of sport” was less important
for them.
Athletes have tried try to explain to naïve outsiders that winning is not the only or even the most
important thing for them when they play prolympic sports. But it is difficult to fully communicate
this to those who lack faced challenges that can be met only through a regimen of sacrifices rarely
experienced outside the extraordinary world of prolympic sports. Without such knowledge or
experience, winning becomes the primary, if not the only criterion used as a measure of success.
Until those who plan and implement drug control programmes recognize the reality of being an
athlete in prolympic sports, and fully understand the context in which athletes make decisions
about training and competition, the game of cat and mouse that has characterized doping control
will continue (Kirstein, 2014; Sluggett, 2011).
Ironically, the approach of officials and testers is to institute even more controls over athletes
whose lives are already over-controlled to the point that they resist the imposition of rules they see
as ineffective, based on misplaced idealism, or motivated by concerns about public relations rather
than their welfare.
In practical terms, the governing bodies of sports do not have the resources to test effectively for
all the PESs that athletes may use. Current testing technologies have weaknesses that can be
overcome only with costly investigations that testing agencies are unprepared to do properly, even
if they had subpoena powers to gather crucial information from witnesses. For example, my guess
is that millions of dollars have been spent on the Lance Armstrong case alone. And Armstrong’s
drug use history is not evaded detection for years.
From the late 1980s to the present
Events over the past quarter century appear to support an explanation of drug use as a form of
deviant overconformity. 6 But this explanation has not been considered or accepted outside of a
small collection of researchers and former athletes who read academic materials in the sociology
of sport. People outside the immediate culture of prolympic sports see the use of PEDs as
subnormal underconformity, that is, as negative deviance. Many even see it is a form of deviance
akin to “original sin” in that it represents a deep moral flaw in “the doper” and erodes the moral
foundation on which the social institution of sport has been built. Therefore, the response to doping
is to demonize the offending athletes and call for them to be banned from sports—like cutting
cancers out of a body. Unlike deviant underconformity (with the exception of match fixing), drug
use in sports is often seen as unforgivable, and the offending athletes are unredeemable. To suggest
that there may be other explanations for drug use or that there is a need to transform the culture
and organization of prolympic sports to deal with it falls on deaf ears. This is because an open
discussion of how, why, and with what support athletes use PESs would force those who idealize
sports to question their beliefs in the following:

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  in sports;
 athletes as role models for young people;
 sports as models of efficient and productive social organization;
 hard work as the sole means of achieving success in sports and life generally.
Such a discussion would disrupt their uncritical connection with sports and create dissonance
related to the amount of time, energy, emotion, and money they devote to sports in their lives. It
is much easier for them to assert without qualification that using drugs constitutes a shortcut and
an indication of moral, mental, or character weaknesses in athletes who are so flawed that they
cannot learn the positive lessons inherent in the sport experience. Despite essentialist beliefs about
sport, the culture of prolympic sports is performance driven, and athletes are part of performance
teams with each member and each team having a stake in the competitive success of their athletes.
The complexity of producing a peak performance is lost on most spectators. They see athletes as
individual performers rather than the most visible members of a highly coordinated training
system. Given the existence of this system, the pressures to overconform to the norms of the sport
ethic become intense. Notable performances, if not winning, are required for athletes to with
membership in a select collection of people living supranormal lives. Failing to meet performance
expectations puts athletes at risk of being cut from a team, dropped by sponsors and the governing
body, and separated from the relationships, experiences, and everyday routines that define them as
persons. To summarize this by saying that athletes will do anything to win is to ignore the
complexity and meaning associated with being an athlete in societies where prolympic sports are
culturally valued and where success requires sacrifice and total dedication with no time off for
making it to the podium or playing on a championship team.
Demonizing athletes for using doping also ignores the profit seekers who give lip service to the
purity and goodness of sports as they help to shape a sport system that ignores the limitations of
athletes’ bodies. When any of their sponsored athletes test positive for drugs, they drop support
for the athletes and quickly reclaim their connection with purity and goodness. As a result the
system and the myths that support it are preserved. The vested interests in the current organization
of prolympic sports are so strong that deviant overconformity will remain common. It will continue
to take a toll on the bodies of athletes and, if they are identified as dopers, they’ll be labeled as
morally flawed and unredeemable enemies in the war on doping.
Notes
1 A pharmaceutical compound is a custom-made medication created by combining or altering
various ingredients; it is usually designed in response to the needs of specific patients/consumers
and distributed through physicians, but may also be distributed directly to individuals. Product
quality depends on the ingredients used and the compounding practices of the pharmacists who
create the product.
2 Peter Donnelly (1996) explains that prolympic sports represent a contemporary combination of
professional and Olympic sports that emphasizes exclusive participation and a quest for victories
and record-setting performances. Prolympism has become the dominant sport ideology worldwide
and is used as the standard against which other sport forms are evaluated, funded, selected for

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media coverage, and incorporated into popular commercial culture. After Donnelly published his
paper in 1996, I used this concept when referring to contemporary high-performance sports in
which athletes are part of a larger structure of vested interests and in which athletes’ participation
careers were controlled by others concerned with commercial success and revenue generation.
3 I use the past tense when discussing the original formulation of deviant overconformity and the
way it was used to explain drug use in prolympic sports at the end of the 1980s.
4 The relationship between sacrifice, Judeo-Christian cultures where both individual and team
achievement are seen to be based on the sacrifices that people are willing to make to reach goals
or contribute to a group or team (Scholes and Sassower, 2014).
5 The term “drugs” and the related term, “doping,” have been defined and used in an arbitrary and
political manner in connection with sports. Many of the substances used by athletes during the late
1980s were not officially banned “drugs,” or they were legally defined as “supplements,” which
allowed manufacturers (in the United States) to avoid FDA testing and regulation (Denham, 1997,
2006, 2007, 2011). “Doping” in English-speaking culture is usually associated with personal
weakness, character flaws, and arejection of mainstream social norms. 6 This evidence comes
directly and indirectly from a wide variety of research and popular sources. Some of these are:
Beamish (2011); Beamish and Ritchie (2006); Brissonneau (2010, 2013); Brissonneau and
Depiesse (2006); Brissonneau and Ohl (2010); Denham (1999, 2000); Dohrmann and Evans
(2013); Duncan (2013); Epstein (2010, 2011); Hoberman (2005); Hruby (2013); Hunt (2011);
Kirstein (2014); Lentillon-Kaestner and Carstairs (2010); Martinović et al. (2011); Matz (2011);
Maughan et al. (2011); Miah (2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2010); Pappa and Kennedy (2013); Pitsch and
Emrich (2012); Rosen (2008); Rossi and Botrè (2011); Safai (2003); Tscholl et al. (2009); Voy
(1991).
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