Understanding and promoting WhIslteblowing oN DOPing irregularities in the EU

Project Description

The White Paper on Sport (2007) revealed that performance enhancing drugs in sport represents a threat to European sport. Little is known about the true prevalence of doping in sport. Although the World Anti-Doping Agency typically report that 1-2% of athletes commit doping offences on a yearly basis, this number may be far higher, according to other research. A recent study reported that up to 57.1% of elite athletes admitted to a doping offence in the previous year of completing an anonymous assessment. As such, it could be argued that alternative approaches are required to detect athletes who dope.

Doping undermines the key principles of sport: open and fair competition. Furthermore, doping can cause serious physical and mental health problems. This may be due to a lack of awareness of what constitutes banned substances, a lack of testing within sport, and athletes having little comprehension of the dangers that banned substances pose to one’s health. For example, Anabolic Androgenic Steroids, which accounted for 43% of doping offences in grassroots sport, is associated with numerous and serious ill effects on the liver, heart, kidneys, and reproductive systems. These illnesses may be irreversible and can ultimately lead to premature death due to supraphysiological intakes.2 For these reasons, it is imperative that efforts are made among Europe to eradicate doping in sport. Historically, Europe has led the way in the fight against doping, with member states such as Italy (1950), France (1965), and Belgium (1965) being among the first to develop anti-doping legislation. However, efforts to tackle doping by some National Anti-Doping Organisations (NADOs) typically focus on elite athletes, so doping offences at other levels may be undetected.

An alternative approach to identify athletes who dope is to encourage fellow athletes, coaches, or sporting personnel to whistle blow. According to a recent fact sheet on whistle-blower protection, whistle-blowers are “people speaking up when they encounter, in the context of their work, wrongdoing that can harm the public interest, for instance by damaging the environment, public health and consumer safety and EU public finances”. Within the context of doping and sport, a whistle-blower is an individual who reports a suspected anti-doping rule violation. The EU recently reported a new system to protect and encourage the reporting of breaches in EU in areas such as tax fraud, public health, data protection, and environment. In particular, the European Parliament emphasised the need to provide safe reporting channels and safeguards against reprisals. Despite the importance and benefits of whistle-blowing in the EU, only 10 EU countries (e.g., France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Netherlands, Slovakia, Sweden and UK) provide comprehensive legal protection to whistle-blowers, and some countries may provide partial protection. At the present time, little is known about the extent to which NADOs and sports federations engage in good practices for whistle-blowing.

Whistle-blowing has the potential to result in the detection, investigation, and even prosecution of anti-doping rule violations, which may have otherwise gone undetected, which poses a threat to the spirit of sport and the health of athletes. As such, whistle-blowers represent an effective way of detecting doping in sport, but whistle-blowers may face retaliation, which can act as a deterrent, and may explain why 81% of respondents failed to report corruption. In order for whistle-blowing to be an effective mechanism of detecting doping in sport, NADOs, sports federations, and policy makers need to increase the frequency of corruption reporting, such as doping by engaging good practices.

Furthermore, very little is known about the psychological factors that predict whether athletes, coaches, and other sporting personnel (e.g., doctors, physiotherapists, nutritionists etc.) will whistle blow a doping offence or remain quiet. Despite whistle-blowing being a very effective mechanism of detecting corruption, such as doping in sport, whistle-blowing in sports is not a common practice. Understanding the reasons why athletes decide to engage in this practice is of vital importance for the promotion of this practice as a mean to tackle doping use.