The Confession Dilemma: Doping, Lying, and Narrative Identity

Abstract

Despite the commonly held view that confessing to doping is morally right, few former elite athletes who have doped confess to doping. In this paper, I ask whether elite athletes who have doped are morally obliged to confess. I start by observing that the core of the elite athlete’s confession dilemma is located in the dichotomy between lying and veracity. I argue that lying about doping belongs to a particular kind of lying that, in turn, brings about a particular kind of consequence. More specifically, I consider lying about doping in light of an athlete’s personal narrative identity. Initially, the narrative identity view seems to strongly support an elite athlete’s moral obligation to confess (i.e. to start telling the truth about who they really are). However, viewing narrative identity not merely as description (responding to the question, Who am I?) but also prescription (responding to the question, Who should I be?) complicates this picture. The prescriptive perspective of narrative identity is a gateway to understand the significant negative consequences of confessing to doping. In this way, I call into question commonly held views about the moral obligation to confess.

Keywords:

• Doping
• cycling
• narrative identity
• confession
• lying

Notes

1. In road cycling, ‘peloton’ is a term used (1) during races to refer to the main group of riders or (2) outside races to refer to riders at a certain sporting level as a whole, for example ‘the professional peloton’.

2. The Festina affair was a series of doping revelations and conflicts that occurred during and after the 1998 Tour de France, commencing with French Customs’ discovery of various doping products in an official team car of the leading French cycling team, Festina (Brissonneau 2015; Voet 2002).

3. In October 2012, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) submitted to the Union Cycliste International (UCI) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) a ‘Reasoned Decision’ in the agency’s case against Lance Armstrong. The Reasoned Decision contained evidence proving beyond doubt the use, possession and distribution of doping substances by Armstrong and the existence of a large-scale doping programme in Armstrong’s US Postal Service Pro Cycling Team (United States Anti-Doping Agency 2012).

4. The term ‘blood doping era’ refers a period lasting from roughly the early 1990s to the late 2000s. In this period, blood doping technologies such as EPO and blood transfusions were supposedly particularly prevalent in professional road cycling (Marty et al., 2015).

5. Recently, uncertainty about the legitimacy of records led to a proposal from European Athletics to erase all world and European records in athletics set before 2005, due to the relative lack of doping tests at the time.

6. Game theoretical approaches to doping in sports highlight this coercive effect (Breivik 1992; Haugen et al. 2013).

7. Kjærgaard’s recitation of the headline is wrong. The actual headline translates into ‘Told the wife about his lie’.