1 Doping in the media
The first activity helps get you started by searching for recent doping stories.
Activity 1 Your initial overview of recent doping stories
Go to this BBC News: Doping [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] page, which collects the latest BBC stories on doping. These are mostly listed chronologically. Look at the most recent 30 doping story headlines and attempt to do the following:
- Categorise the different types of focus of the stories. For example, is there a common theme of stories about positive drug test results, or another about bans/sanctions imposed on an athlete, or other categories you can identify?
- Identify how many different sports or activities these stories come from.
Make some notes in the text box. These notes are only visible to you.
Discussion
- Many of the stories sampled at the time of writing are about bans being imposed and, in some cases, lifted. Test results are also the focus of some stories and another category was reporting about Russian doping transgressions. It seems most media stories focus on catching athletes and the sanctions imposed on them.
- The total number of different sports that feature in media reports is surprisingly high. In 2023 the United Kingdom Anti-Doping (UKAD) online records showed live sanctions across 17 sports: athletics, boxing, basketball, bobsleigh, cricket, cycling, darts, football, ice hockey, motorsport, rowing, rugby league/union, squash, swimming, weightlifting and wrestling (UKAD, 2023). Through this short media search you have perhaps already learned a little more about the wide extent of doping including private use of muscle-building drugs in gyms. This gym-related phenomenon is known in the literature as ‘image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDS)’.
This activity shows that, at the time of writing, the BBC’s reporting focuses on a limited number of issues. There is very little discussion of anti-doping policy, why people dope (drawing on psychology) or the social context (sociology) that influences them, or the moral arguments behind anti-doping and any sanctions imposed.
When studying doping it can be helpful to gain some historical perspective, which you will now go on to do.