Universalism and the spirit of sport: evidence from Greece and Australia

Abstract

Despite the World Anti-Doping Code’s 11-value Spirit of Sport statement being declared the universal ethical basis for global sporting practice, there is no empirical evidence whether the Spirit statement is the universal ethical basis for sport. Best-worst scaling surveys were completed by five independent (two Greek and three Australian) to determine whether there is cultural variation in which values were considered important or unimportant to sport. The results indicate Greeks and Australians mostly agree about what is unimportant to sport, but vary in terms of what is considered important. The variation indicates that the ethical justification for anti-doping may be less than universal. Moreover, the findings point to the need for more research into the Spirit statement as the proscribed universal ethical basis for a global practice, including philosophical and ethical inquiry, and how people understand both the individual values and the Spirit statement as a whole.

Keywords:

• Anti-doping
• best-worst scaling
• cross-cultural psychology
• Spirit of sport
• universalism

Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Greek students and their teachers who generously donated their time to this study. The authors also wish to thank Datacol for their invaluable assistance in developing the Australian data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We thank the reviewer for pointing out this possible interpretation.

2 We thank the reviewer for pointing out this possibility, and look forward to further exploration of how the Spirit statement reveals the contested power relationships in the field created by the anti-doping policy.