The toxic doxa of “clean sport” and IOC’s and WADA’s quest for credibility

Abstract

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.