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The objective of this article is to understand how the specific interactions between actors involved in the production of performance influence the socialization process by which cyclists learn their job. In particular, we try to understand how these interactions determine the reported attitudes towards doping products and methods. We focused on the interactions within the work group to understand how young cyclists learn their job. While analysing this organization of work, our goal is to understand how it influences the perception of the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). We compared socialization of young elite and U23 cyclists in Belgium, France and Switzerland. We analysed the economic, legal and organizational conditions in each country, and we conducted 70 semi-structured interviews with cyclists and their staff.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have been held accountable for the “Russian crisis,” a major state-sponsored doping scandal, which began in 2014. The scandal has brought intense scrutiny on the IOC’s and WADA’s efficiency in curbing doping. This paper argues that their impaired credibility should not only be explained through their objective failure in preventing doping in Russia but can be mainly understood through an analysis of their staged promises of clean sport. This study relies on the analysis of a corpus of official policy documents from the IOC and WADA over the last two decades, several media sources, and field-notes from our “participant-as-observer” role during several anti-doping meetings. In the first part of this article, we argue that to convince the audiences of their commitment to the fight against doping, WADA and the IOC collaborate to create a “team presentation” in which “impression management” is used to stage promises of a strong anti-doping doxa. The second part of the article elaborates that performances are vulnerable and complicated. Because of its scale, the Russian crisis disrupted the IOC’s and WADA’s dramaturgy, revealing their individual agendas and their rivalries over the control of the doxa, with the IOC seeking to protect its power and WADA trying to remain a “trust device.” Finally, the article shows that the IOC and WADA trapped themselves within their own staged discourse because of their divisions and their outbidding promises of clean sport, which turned ineffective and even “toxic.” We conclude that such a scenario was detrimental to the overall anti-doping efforts and the subsequent credibility of these organizations.

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In 2016, the Olympic Movement had to face a major crisis of state sponsored doping in Russia. This crisis raised suspicions about the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-doping Agency’s (WADA) efficiency and integrity. This article focuses on the Russian doping case, as it offers rich and diverse empirical material that helps understand the social context of the production and circulation of performance. To this end, we articulate Bourdieu’s fields theory and Abbott’s linked ecologies as relevant models to analyse and discuss our case study and its implications. We used newspaper articles on the Russian crisis, a content analysis of official WADA and IOC publications, and field notes taken during informal talks with anti-doping stakeholders. In this article, it is argued that IOC and WADA’s social performance was ineffective for three reasons. First, the crisis revealed the gap between the promises of anti-doping and the widespread doping in Russia. Second, it demonstrated the extent to which the Russian crisis fragilised the binding role of the sport doxa, reinforced the role of anti-doping stakeholders’ specific ecologies and belittled cooperation between them to display a shared meaning of the situation. Third, embedded in a complex web of interactions and interdependencies with other actors, WADA and the IOC were unable to perform a convincing ‘social performance’ and both were judged to be ineffective and untrustworthy. The results of the study show (1) the importance of the diachronic dimension of social performance; (2) the relevance of relying on Bourdieu’s field theory to understand the central role of temporality in the production of meanings; (3) the usefulness of Abbott’s perspective to understand that producers do not control the meanings and understand how they were reframed; (4) the relative autonomy of the meanings associated with social performance.

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