This study aims to investigate and dissect the meanings attached to women’s use of performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs), how fitness doping can be understood in terms of gender and spatiality, and what implications this has for women’s communicative engagement with one another within an online forum. The study is based on a netnographic and qualitative methodology. Theoretically, it considers a women’s online forum for PIEDs and analyzes it as a community of practice (CofP) and a spatiality in which gender, bodies, and side effects are discussed and negotiated. The results show that although the women’s forum provides a space for women to share their own unique experiences, there is a limit to the extent to which the discussions mirror the experiences and experimentations of women. Instead, discussions are often dominated by men’s voices/experiences. This has two main implications. Firstly, the prevalence of men’s voices can block the development of a women’s CofP. Symbolically, men engage in a sort of cultural manspreading by encroaching on the women’s forum space. Secondly, it has implications for women’s PIED use and use practices. Women seeking out advice or the experiences of other women must navigate through and around men’s contributions.

Aim: This article investigates the available support services/interventions offered by sporting organisations worldwide for athletes facing career transitions resulting from suspensions due to violating anti-doping policy. The authors aim to provide an overview of existing support systems and raise an awareness of the need of customised and structured support for sanctioned athletes as part of duty of care in sport, Method: Web-based data was initially collected. Following this we contacted each sport organisation by email with a request to answer prepared research questions. Fifty sport organisations were contacted, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and National Olympic Committees (NOCs). The data from 22 sport organisations representing five continents are presented.Results: The data are presented under five main themes: Termination of support, Psychological support, Financial support, Informative support, and Development in progress. The central finding is that none of the sporting organisations in this study has established a structured support programme or system for supporting doping sanctioned athletes to date. Conclusion:In most cases sanctioned athletes are simply cut off from all organisational support and left to cope on their own when they are likely to be vulnerable. We argue there is a need for better awareness and support programmes of the challenges faced by athletes following a competition ban or other forced exit from sport due to an anti-doping violation.

The war on drugs is usually associated with criminal policies aimed at stemming consumption of drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and cannabis, less so with enhancement drugs like those used in sport. As drug use in sport, or doping, has become more visibly widespread, policies aimed at combating the issue have become more restrictive, intrusive, and harsh. In this article we draw new comparisons between the wider war on drugs and recent developments in sports anti-doping. We identify a growing trend towards criminalisation of traffickers and users, and associate that with another growing trend: the testing of amateur athletes. This article reviews the current anti-doping system, including the recent amateur policies, then considers of the results of one such program in amateur cycling. We then shift to consider the possible implications for amateurs of criminal doping laws and the recent debates about allowing medical exemptions for therapeutic use of banned substances. We show that drug use in sport can be understood as a new front in the war on drugs, with some extreme measures and many negative unintended consequences. To remedy this, we argue that amateur athletes require a separate anti-doping policy focused on minimising harms of use.

The focus of researchers, media and policy on doping in cycling is often limited to the professional level of the sport. However, anti-doping test results since 2001 demonstrate that banned substances are also used by US cyclists at lower levels of the sport, necessitating a broader view of the patterns and motivations of substance use within the sport. In this article, we describe and explain the doping culture that has emerged in domestic US cycling among amateur and semi-professionals. Through analysis of records from sports governing bodies and journalistic reports, we assess the range of violation types and discuss the detection and punishing of riders who were not proven to have intended to cheat but became “collateral damage” in the war on doping. We argue that the phenomenon of doping is more complex than what has been shown to occur in elite sport, as it includes a wider variety of behaviours, situations and motivations. We develop fresh insights by examining cases where doping has been accidental, intrinsically motivated, non-performance enhancing or the result of prescribed medical treatments banned by anti-doping authorities. Such trends call into question the fairness of anti-doping measures, and we discuss the possibility of developing localised solutions to testing and sanctioning amateur athletes.

Understandings of image and performance enhancing drugs (IPEDs) and their use has largely been conceptualized through the lens of male hegemonic patterns, treating women’s doping as a threat to the “natural” gender order. This article focuses on an exclusive, women-only online IPED forum. It aims to describe and analyze how this new forum was met within the broader doping community, and how issues related to IPED use and gender are addressed by women when their views are not backgrounded by potential male commentators and misogynistic discourses. The results show that first-hand knowledge is disseminated by women, which contributes to the foundation of a women’s ethnopharmacological (sub)culture. Women, their bodies, and experiences become the standard and the “unspoken” norm in the discussions. The secluded space allows women to challenge patterns of hegemonic masculinity, while building and reinforcing women’s experiences, bodies, and expertise as the standard. This stresses the importance of moving beyond hegemonic conceptualizations to understand the ongoing socio-cultural changes to the gender balance of IPED use and to center women’s doping experiences, and the risks associated with use. This has implications for the formation and development of both this community and of a “sis-science” based on women’s knowledge and experience.