Fight Against Doping as a Social Performance: The Case of the 2015–2016 Russian Anti-Doping Crisis

Abstract

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.