Journal of Sport and Social Issues

Despite the growing research on doping in sport, there is little analysis of the sanctioning process. This article contributes to remedying this gap by examining anti-doping rule violation hearings heard before the California State Athletic Commission. Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork informed by socio-legal approaches, it explores how athletes articulate defenses against formal accusations of doping. Their performances reveal broader power relationships. Analysis of the interactions between participants in the hearings illustrates how relational aspects of the hearings are integral to understanding the anti-doping sanctioning process. In sum, this article reveals how attempts to adhere to seemingly objective, procedural protocols and intersectional forms of social difference converge, complicating the pursuit of the Commission’s mandate to protect the health of athletes under its jurisdiction.

This article examines the trend toward risk-based, preemptive social control as it has developed in anti-doping regulation in professional cycling. Specifically, this research considers how the regulatory technologies of anti-doping surveillance have become a core component of the everyday routines of professional cyclists. Drawing from interviews with professional cyclists and analysis of mediated representations of anti-doping, we find that surveillance and disclosure have become not simply routine, but a central orienting practice in the everyday lives of professional cyclists. Blended into the everyday routines, surveillance technologies extend the gaze of those who watch and increase pressures to disclose. As athletes internalize surveillance and disclosure as consistent with their professional norms, the power relationships that surround sport performance become increasingly difficult to discern.

Contractual agreements have become an accepted part of participation processes for athletes in a variety of sport contexts. Closer readings of these contracts, however, pose several questions regarding organizational intentions and motivations, the conceptualization of athletes as “workers,” and representation parity. In this article, we draw on four types of athlete contractual documents from both select international “amateur” and “professional” sport settings. Our key considerations include athletes’ ownership over their image and identities; medical and health disclosures; lifestyle, behavioral and body choices, and restrictions beyond sport; adherence to organizational philosophy and commitments; and social media and publicity constraints. Our exegesis here encourages sport researchers to deliberate whose “wellbeing” matters most when signing that seductive dotted line.

Despite women’s increased participation in sport, women’s team sport leagues have yet to find a lasting toehold at the professional level. Using ethnographic data collected with U.S. women’s professional soccer in 2011-2012, I situate the work of selling women’s soccer in the complex institutional environment of contemporary women’s sports organizations. League owners and employees were dually influenced by the hypercommercialized model of success presented by men’s professional sports and an institutionalized, depoliticized feminist model of sport promoting empowerment and role modeling for girls and women. As a result, “business” and “cause” institutional logics presented different organizational goals. These logics contained divergent assumptions about the extent of gender (in)equality facing women’s professional sports. They were also understood somewhat differently along gender lines, with men perceiving empowerment and profit to be compatible goals more often than women. Implications for the viability of women’s professional sports leagues are discussed.