Knowledge of doping: How athletes learn about doping rules and practices

This chapter seeks to inform the ongoing debates on doping by assessing the views and opinions of a large group of elite athletes and athlete support personnel, defined here as coaches and other support staff at the athlete’s club or organisation. Rather than treading well-worn (and largely futile) paths of assessing attitudes to doping (Connor, 2009), or trying to determine the incidence of doping, it focuses on a range of issues, such as whether athletes and support personnel believe that their teammates and direct competitors are doping, how athletes might go about obtaining banned substances, proposed sanctions for deliberate and accidental doping, and, finally, views on the effectiveness of national and international anti-doping organisations. The broad aim is to assess knowledge of current doping practices within sport. We hope that the resulting views will provide sport managers insight into the real scope of doping and the extent to which anti-doping efforts are succeeding.